What’s That Smell?

Recently some close friends were going through the rituals of trying to buy their first home. They toured open houses, scoured Redfin, looked at everything imaginable in their price range. One home that they particularly liked was in a better neighborhood than others but was very outdated and had a terrible odor throughout. When she told me about it, I couldn’t help but laugh and remember a similar experience.

Back in 1995 it was a sellers market for much of the Peninsula. While we had trouble “unloading” our turn-of-the-century charmer, once we finally got an offer, we were pressed to find a home. In the span of a week, my realtor and I had seen more homes than I care to remember. Toward the end of that week, a house came back on the market due to the buyer’s inability to qualify for a loan. My realtor and I rushed over to see it the next morning. From the street, everything appeared normal, but what lurked behind closed and locked doors and gates was a very different story indeed.

Parking the car, we headed to the front gate, which allowed access to the front porch door, which allowed access to the front front door. A padlock on the gate kept us from making any further progress. I knew the owners were expecting us, but there was no way to get in. The garage door was closed and our calls when unanswered. We knocked on the gate, knocked on the garage, and still nothing. Just as we were about the give up, the seller’s agent showed up and called the owners directly.

We were reluctantly, it seemed, granted access to the house via the garage door. Thus began our tour from hell. The kitchen, never remodeled in its 25 years, had cracked tile, chipped linoleum floors, dirty dishes all over the counters and a stove caked with who-knows-what. But all that paled in comparison to the smell. Moving into the adjacent dining turned family room, we found cheap paneling and a threadbare rug, and the odor was intensified. I looked for a source, but could find nothing obvious.

The living room was a stager’s nightmare: baby blue walls, blue variegated shag carpeting, frilly blue cotton and lace curtains, a whole wall of cabinets and shelves filled with a doll collection, and so much furniture you could barely move around. And, again, the smell. Dark hallway, smell. By the time we entered the first bedroom we had identified the odor and were having to breathe through our mouths.

Animal urine, years and years of it, pervaded every room, every corner, every piece of furniture. Far beyond what I would call a smell, this was a stench. The two single bedrooms probably smelled the worst, while the master bedroom fared pretty well in the odor department. But we had thought we had walked in on a brothel, with pink walls, red velvet flocked wallpaper, pink shag carpeting, marble dressing table. I was fully expecting a trapeze hanging from the ceiling!

The whole experience took us less than 10 minutes and left me appalled. Not only did I not understand how they could live like that, but why no one had taken steps to rectify the odor problem before it went on the market.

As we drove away, the smell lingered. Mid-February and we had the windows rolled down, freezing our butts off, because we couldn’t stand the smell of ourselves. All we could do was laugh until we reached the next listing, which thankfully had a lemon tree out in the front yard. Taking several pieces of the citrus off the tree, we squeezed softly to release lemon oil, and rubbed the lemons all over our clothing to help with the pervasive odor.

Funny thing is, we actually ended up buying that house. It took weeks of gutting, airing out, replacing, repainting, and refinishing of hardwood floors to make it habitable, but it has been a great investment (worst house, best neighborhood). And believe it our not, our friends closed on their smelly house just last week. They are in the process of gutting it as I write….