I'm finally working on the house again and some of the neighbors have been dropping by to see what I'm up to. In the process they've supplied some partial answers to the mystery of the
stinky room:
(To briefly recap, we originally thought our office room had a pet urine odor problem, but because the house had been a rental that ended badly with a lot of damage and other problems, we were anxious to find out the source of the odor and rule out the possibility of meth lab contaminants which can have a similar smell). From what I can now piece together from the recollections of neighbors, the last renters had a dog that they left in the house (along with most of their belongings and a huge amount of garbage) for a number of weeks after they and other various people staying there had moved out. Someone was coming by to feed the dog, but for weeks no one was cleaning up after it! It appears that our "office" room and the adjacent half-bath was the poor dog's lavatory during that time, and the floors (and whatever furniture was there) were completely soaked.
Ugh! I'm honestly amazed that the owner was able to clean up and hide the odor to the point where we didn't notice it until we had been in the house for a week or two. (And then of course once we removed the carpet it was much, much worse). Anyway, it's a relief to finally know the source of the stench.
Now, on to getting rid of the smell.... here's a series of photos illustrating our progress so far:
Here's the stinky floor last fall before demolition:
It's really amazing old growth pine-- most pieces were 14 feet long, from one wall to the other!
(The white parts seem to be spackle that someone used to fill in the worst of the termite damage before carpeting over it).
I had a plumber help me take out the toilet & vanity in the half-bath, and then I started chiseling up the laminate flooring in that room. (I tried using a hot iron to soften the glue which helped a little, but most of the laminate still came out in splinters, leaving most of the glue on the pine boards below).
Here's the room with 2/3 of the pine flooring pulled up. (Ignore that rectangle of parquet-- it's just on a piece of plywood that I pulled up from the living room, and I'm using it to keep from falling through the floor as I work).
In spite of the smell, I pulled the nails from the best pieces of flooring and found a brave soul via freecycle with more outdoor storage space than me who took them away to try to treat and re-use them. (:D *is happy to be saving trees*)
so.... with the flooring out, guess what? The room still reeked! So I'm currently busy replacing the most damaged (and stinkiest) pieces of subflooring.
So yeah, at this point I realize it would have been faster to have torn out all the subflooring and replaced it with particle board. D'oh! But I'm almost done and blessedly it smells MUCH BETTER and the remaining odor seems to be localized to a few of the really squishy boards I still have to replace!!
Here is the stinky subflooring I cut out waiting to go to the curb:
*waves goodbye to our stench* (I hope!) With luck I'll be nailing in the new flooring this week. :)
