First things first, you need to know the layout of part of where I live. I am in a basement suite within a house, when I leave my suite I am in a hallway, go to the right I end up in the laundry room, go to the left I am at the door to the wooooorld!…well, the backyard, but hey, it’s part of the world! 😉 lol
About a week ago when I came home I came through the door from the outside to the hallway and was struck by an unpleasant odour. It was faint but definitely there and I had no idea what it was. I wondered if the landlords (who live upstairs) cooked something that went horribly wrong and the scent made its way downstairs but other than that didn’t give it too much thought. I figured it’d be gone by the next day so no biggie.
Ha!
The next day it was still there, only stronger. The smell didn’t reach in to my suite, thank goodness, and it wasn’t in the laundry room, just the hallway. On the other side of the outer wall is where the garbage can and compost can are kept so I thought maybe its that and somehow the smell is getting inside but when I went outside I was greeted with the smell of fresh air, not the stench from the hallway. Well, what the hell…where is it coming from? I poked around the hallway a bit, moving shoes and random bits and pieces around thinking maybe food spilled and was going bad and if it was me that spilled it I’d better find it before my landlords did! Didn’t find a thing, except for a lot of dust, hey, neat freaks we are not, don’t judge! 😛 lol
Well, the landlords came home yesterday and today I ran in to one of them so we were chatting and the hallway smell came up in conversation. He had the door to the outside open to air the hallway out. Turns out the joke I made yesterday to a friend about something decomposing was the truth, ugh. A mouse got in to the wall, died, and is now in the process of decomposing and the oh-so-lovely smell is that…the smell of death when it isn’t buried.
Note to self: if I ever kill someone, bury them! 😉
So you’d think because of the open door for most of the day the smell would have at least faded a teeny tiny bit right? Well, wrong! I got home around 9pm and it was worse…Worse!! How that is even possible I do not know but oh man, it is so much more potent now, aaaaaaand it has spread so the laundry room reeks. *gag* I really hope it doesn’t spread in to my suite…
My landlord said this happened one other time, a mouse crawled in to the heating duct and died right near the vent so he had to take out a huge chunk of the heating duct because apparently the smell doesn’t come out of metal. He started talking about how the juices spread and lemme tell ya, all kinds of visuals popped in to my head, none of them pleasant!
Thing is, I am so sympathetic to all animals, well, not spiders but c’mon, they are creepy! that I feel really bad for this poor dead mouse. I keep thinking of this little mouse, thinking it has found a safe place and then falling down in to the deep dark depths of the wall, maybe it got hurt when it fell, maybe not, but either way it is stuck down there, unable to get back up cause it can’t climb the wall, slowly starving to death, being able to smell the food I’ve been cooking in my suite, thinking about all his mouse buddies who are wondering where he got off to, then being so desperate for food he starts gnawing at the wall only to get wall splinters in his stomach that make him hurt, maybe even slowly hemorrhage, until eventually he dies a horrible lonely scared death. Nobody deserves a death like that, poor little mouse. 😦
So yeah, I’m feeling bad for the mouse, cause that’s how I roll. But at the same time I’m really not enjoying the smell that I encounter every time I go in to the hallway and laundry room and even though its not the little mouse’s fault I really wish he could have not gotten caught in the wall of this particular house and brought this smell in to my life. Which is awfully selfish of me…sigh…
In case you are wondering, the landlord says there is nothing he can do, we have to “wait it out” which I guess is code for “wait till the maggots eat the flesh and juices from the corpse and there is nothing left to create a smell”.
Lovely.
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 
try spraying Febreze all around the hallway – it’s supposed to get rid of smells! There’s also a product called Nil-Odor (or at least, there used to be) which is supposed to get rid of nasty smells. Good luck.