Weird smell in bathrooms

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
We recently had a very odd smell in the house, was like something had died and concentrated around the two bathrooms. It went, but in the last 2 days it has returned. Can't tell downstairs but upstairs it seems to come from the toilet, obviously I've done the whole cover it in bleach etc. but nothing seems to work. Downstairs is more tricky, I can't really tell where it is coming from. The upstairs bathroom is directly above the downstairs one, and in the past I've had mice get into the house in the downstairs bathroom (through a wall? No holes outside but they definitely get in halfway up the wall and into some light fixtures).

So, any ideas? Can it be the drains if there is water in the u-bend? There is a drain under the bit where I'm sure the mice got in, could they have somehow got into the cavity wall from below and the smell is the drain under the house? But that wouldn't explain upstairs, unless it's simply coming through the floor? It really does smell like a corpse, it aint nice!
 

Tilly

Well-Known Forumite
We recently had a very odd smell in the house, was like something had died and concentrated around the two bathrooms. It went, but in the last 2 days it has returned. Can't tell downstairs but upstairs it seems to come from the toilet, obviously I've done the whole cover it in bleach etc. but nothing seems to work. Downstairs is more tricky, I can't really tell where it is coming from. The upstairs bathroom is directly above the downstairs one, and in the past I've had mice get into the house in the downstairs bathroom (through a wall? No holes outside but they definitely get in halfway up the wall and into some light fixtures).

So, any ideas? Can it be the drains if there is water in the u-bend? There is a drain under the bit where I'm sure the mice got in, could they have somehow got into the cavity wall from below and the smell is the drain under the house? But that wouldn't explain upstairs, unless it's simply coming through the floor? It really does smell like a corpse, it aint nice!

First thought was drain, second, dead rat, third, perhaps your local councillor was in the area
 
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littleme

250,000th poster!
Are your toilets flushing properly - no drain (blocked outside) problems that could send the smell back up via the toilet pans?

We had a dead rat rotting under our shed a few years ago & didn't find it for days, the smell was horrendous - a mixture of shite, piddles & blood, really stuck in your throat too - could one of got in where the mice have been comming in & died inbetween the floorboards?

If you put poison down for the mice, they should dehydrate & not smell.

Only other thing I can think was when we had an extra window added to the house - when they cut out the bricks for the window inbetween the walls were tonnes of twigs, sticks, feathers & bird shite, it absolutely stunk too - it's all the way through the wall cavity's after the birds have built nests in the eaves & everything's fallen down inside the walls & compacted.
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Have a look in the roof above the upstairs one.

You can sometimes defeat u-bends in windy weather, but we haven't had much of that lately.

I remember a hint of a smell on a Friday - by the Monday, when we returned, a building the size of Lidl was almost uninhabitable - that was a blackbird who was stuck behind a radiator...

Another one, in the same building, was a Stapelia, a sort of cactus thing, given to the secretary as a joke - after about a year it finally flowered and stank like a recently opened mass grave.

Stapelia-orbea-variegata-650-650x650.jpg


It took a while to realise it was that and then to find out what it was - common name, Carrion Flower...
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Do you have a manhole? Another cause can be a blockage in the pipe away from the house - each flush will run into the space that slow drainage creates between flushes, but the flush will need to eject 'air' from the sewer back into the house, to make space in the pipe. Have a look in the manhole....
 

tek-monkey

wanna see my snake?
Smell hasn't been there all weekend, came in today and it stank. House has been empty all day so it's not them, seemed particularly bad near the front door this time and there are no drains there. Damn, thought it'd sorted itself out!
 

Gadget

Well-Known Forumite
Smell hasn't been there all weekend, came in today and it stank. House has been empty all day so it's not them, seemed particularly bad near the front door this time and there are no drains there. Damn, thought it'd sorted itself out!
A strong potential for Zombie mice. They are dragging themselves around the house whilst you aren't in/looking.
 

Apricot

Well-Known Forumite
There was a nasty smell in our house when we bought it. The sellers had all the windows open whenever we viewed, and we thought nothing of it because it was summer. But when we shut the windows, the smell built up.
It was a sort of stale smell, like there was something dead.
We had an overlap on our rental tenancy so we didn't move our stuff in straight away, and I wanted to spend the time decorating, but I ended up wasting days trying to find the source of the smell. I was crawling around on my hands and knees trying to sniff it out, with Mr Apricot following me around thinking I was presenting.
Eventually I pulled up the floorboards and located the smell - it was a gas leak! There were actually 2 gas leaks in separate rooms - the joints had failed in the pipes.
It didn't smell like gas though, which is why I didn't check for that straight away. Also the smell floated around the house so that made it harder to track down.
If you think it might be that, gas plumbers have a little device to detect gas leaks, wish I'd known about that earlier.
 
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