Adventures in Home Ownership: The Smell in the Kitchen

It all started about 6 weeks ago.  I came home from a particularly long day at work to find that our refrigerator and freezer had stopped working and everything in the freezer was thawed.  It was a wet, sticky mess.  One I did not want to clean up.  Even more importantly, I did not want to think about the possibility that we would need to buy a new unit.  I moved the fridge out and looked at the cords.  I flipped the breakers to the kitchen.  I checked the lights in both the freezer and the refrigerator to see if they were working.  After much puttering around I couldn't find what the problem was; so I left it for my husband to figure out when he got home.  After several days of having the fridge/freezer turn off and on at random intervals, we finally figured it out.  The cord for the unit was plugged into the wall via an adapter, due to the fact that all the outlets in our fine house are very old and thus, not grounded.  The fridge cord is a three prong cord, the outlet was a two prong.  The adapter the cord was using had become loose and the cord was not staying plugged in, thus it was shutting off.  My husband spent a Saturday swapping out the outlet and then plugging the fridge in.  Viola!  It worked like a charm and we had our lovely freezer and fridge back, without buying a new one.  But, that's was only the beginning of this adventure.

In order to explain this next part, I will have to go back several months.  My husband and I bought our lovely house last year in July and moved in the first week of August.  We bought the house from a sweet old lady who had been living here for 20 years.  She had taken very good care of the house and we were thrilled to be moving in to a home that didn't require us to do major repairs right away.  We had been in the house for a few months when things started to get interesting.

My husband and I have a dog, and although she doesn't dig deep holes, or dig to escape our back yard, she is a dog and she does like to dig things up.  The first thing she uncovered was a pile of what appeared to be buried household trash - old egg cartons, plastic grocery backs, cardboard boxes, etc.  She also periodically showed up with old blocks of wood and pieces of old butcher bones that another dog must have buried.

One day in December, a few days after a particularly heavy snow had fallen, she greeted me at the door with a bone in a her mouth.  Somehow it looked very different than the other things she had unearthed, so I pried it from her mouth in order to get a better look.  It was a hip bone, an actual, real hip bone.  It certainly did not belong to a small animal and I wasn't sure it belonged to any animal.  Me being the overly imaginative type, I instantly had visions of my dog unearthing a dead human in our backyard.  My logical side asserted itself and I pushed the silly thoughts from my head.  It must have come from a cow bone or something that the previous owner's dog had chewed on and then buried.  Right??  Yes, that had to be what it was.  I put the bone somewhere safe in our sunroom where the dog could not get it and determined to move on.

Over the next 3 or 4 months I would occasionally glance at the bone as I went in and out my back door and it would cause me to wonder.  I talked about it with some friends and they insisted I take it to the local police station to make sure it wasn't human.  I really didn't think that was necessary.  There's no way it could be human, and, besides, I had no idea where my dog had gotten the bone from.  She hadn't dug up any others, so it must not be a big deal.

Then, in April, something else creepy happened.  I was home alone one night.  It had rained all day and everything was wet and muddy.  During the later part of the evening, the storm picked up again and I could hear the wind howling outside.  My dog was acting very strange, unsettled and barking a lot.  She kept walking back and forth between the front and back doors, growling and acting nervous.  One particularly loud woosh of wind hit the house and the upstairs started creaking as though someone was walking around up there.  It sent the dog into fits of barking and and made me jump almost out of my skin.  I decided to step outside the back door and take a look around, just to reassure myself it really was the wind and not some strange man trying to enter my home and attack me.

I stepped into the sunroom and looked out onto the patio.  There, laying exactly in front of the sliding glass door, was a small hatchet.  The hatchet did not belong to us and I had never seen it before.  With the wind rushing around me, lighting flashing sporadically, and that hatchet just lying there as though it had been left for me, I felt like I was living my very own version of The 'Burbs.  I wanted to scream, and God knows my heart was pounding a mile a minute, but I forced myself to walk out and pick up the hatchet.  I inspected it closely.  It was old and very rusted and it had clearly been buried until recently.  The dog must have dug it up and brought it to the porch to chew on.  At least that was what my logical mind was telling me.

I brought the hatchet inside, deciding it was safer to have it with me than to leave it outside for any possible prowlers to pick up and use on me.  I know, it sounds ridiculous, but a woman at home alone during a storm that caused her house to sound like it's being invaded by the worst creatures imaginable is apt to have some silly thoughts.  In my defense, the only truly silly thing I did was call my husband and plead for him to come home as soon as he could.  Anyway, after that night I put the hatchet outside, also in the sunroom, and left it there.  Now I have both the bone and the hatchet to keep me wondering every time I see them.

Now, keeping all this information in mind, we return to the broken refrigerator and it's aftermath.  It was 3 days after we fixed the fridge that these two seemingly unrelated incidences converged.  I came home from work that evening and was greeted with a most unpleasant smell in the house.  It smelled liked something had died and was starting to decompose.  I had a voice lesson to teach, so I hastily lit some candles and opened windows to help alleviate the smell.  After my lesson, I went on a mission to find the source of the horrible smell and expel it from the house.  After exploring every inch of the house, my nose told me the smell was originating from the kitchen.  Logically, I assumed it had to be coming from the fridge or freezer and was likely the result of that unit's malfunction the week before.  I cleaned and scrubbed the fridge and freezer and emptied it of anything I thought may have gone bad.  When my husband came home, we further investigated to determine exactly where the smell was coming from.  After careful examination of the entire unit, I gave my opinion that the smell must be coming from the drip pan under the freezer.  My husband disagreed and said he couldn't see anything down there but dried up liquid and he didn't think that was it.  We agreed to look elsewhere, beginning the great hunt to locate the awful kitchen smell.

Over the next 5 weeks the smell got worse and worse.  It would wax and wane throughout the day, usually being worse at night.  We tried everything we could think of.  We moved the refrigerator and cleaned behind it, cleaned everything inside again, threw away more food.  We even looked in the crawl space below the house to see if an animal had become trapped and died down there.  No luck.  The smell of death and rotting continued to fill our house.

Last weekend I made one last attempt to pinpoint the exact location of the smell.  By this point, I was so sick of living with the smell that I was determined to find it and get rid of it.  I became convinced that it was coming from the wall behind the fridge.  If I moved the fridge out, the smell was strongest back there.  It had to be coming from something back there.  There is a small corner where the cabinets meet the wall and there is slight crack in the baseboards there.  The smell was really bad in this area.  It had to be the source of the stink.  My husband was skeptical, but couldn't deny that the smell was concentrated to that area of the kitchen.    He poked around and then declared that he did not think the smell was in the walls.

Now, living with a horrid stench can drive someone mad, and thinking and saying silly things out of sheer desperation is not, I don't believe, an illogical result of that madness.  I was a desperate woman in need of answers, as well as a solution.  Coming home to and waking up to the horrid smell of decay was really starting to get to me, and no amount of nice smelling candles or fresh air could help me.  My poor mind began to explore all the possibilities in the hopes of finding an answer.  I began to remember all the strange things that had happened since moving in.  The memory of finding the bone and the hatchet lodged themselves in my mind and I could not escape them.  What if.... what if the nice old lady we bought the house from... wasn't all that nice after all?  What if that terrible, dreadful smell was linked to something really terrible after all?  Something like a dead body, or pieces of it, hidden in the kitchen wall behind the refrigerator.

I pleaded with my husband to cut the wall out behind the fridge so we could see if something had died in there.  This was not a popular idea.  All that weekend I talked about it and begged him to do something, even something drastic.  We could repair the wall, no problem.  I needed to know if there were dead people in my house.  I needed that smell to be gone.

I woke up Sunday morning to find the fridge pulled out from the wall, the front vent in pieces on the floor, and tools strewn about in the kitchen.  I had to leave the house early, before my husband was up, so I would have to find out from him later what he was doing.  Later that afternoon I asked him what the mess was all about.  "Oh," he said, "I read online that lots of other people have had this problem and that the smell comes from the drip pan that sits under the freezer.  I checked it out and that's where it's coming from.  I took the front vent apart trying to figure out how to get the pan out so we could clean it.  Unfortunately, it doesn't come out, so we will have to find another way to get to it."  Wait...the pan that I suggested was the culprit 5 weeks ago?  That pan is where this stench is coming from?  Seriously?  So, there are no dead people in my walls?  Wait, so we could have solved this 5 WEEKS ago???

I spent the next three days on my hands and knees with a bottle of Pinesol and paper towels, stretching my arms to their limit in order to get that pan clean.  I finally did it, and the smell is finally gone.  As it turns out, it really wasn't dead bodies in my walls after all, just a smelly drip pan that had collected all the raw meat and food juices and held them while they rotted.  I'm thankful there were no bodies, and I am really thankful that disgusting smell is gone.