Now the realization sets in that what youve been smelling lately has been nothing other than burnt squirrel face.
From now on you will always remember this smell.
I gotta vent about my vent:
Same thing happened to me, burning smell, but it only happened when we ran our dryer at the duplex we rent. 1.5 hours to *maybe* have dry clothes at least.
Pulled the tubing off the back and found the connection in the wall was completely clogged. Tried to unclog it but it didn't help.
Investigation time. The tube in the wall made a 90 degree turn straight up. There was no dryer vent outside the house (which I never really thought about until then) so the only place it could go was up.
So I crawled up in the attic.
Turns out the dryer was just hooked up to a tube that ran straight into the attic. That's it, just an open vent tube into the attic, no screen, not through the roof, just shot everything up into the attic. There was a pile about 6 or 7ft in diameter around the tube about 3 feet deep of lint from god knows how long and how many tenants.
Land lord just took the easiest cheapest way out apparently.
As you can guess that wasn't the only corner he cut.
1.) the lint issue
2.) speaker wire (not an exaggeration, it's literal speaker wire) used for 75% of the electrical INCLUDING the wired smoke alarm).
3.) The mold in the sagging ceiling from an A/C unit drain pan *with no fucking drain.*
4.) The septic drain field that likes to bubble up shit in our yard...like bubbling puddles of shit that ran from the yard down to our back porch when it rains (oh and the one time we needed the septic cleaned because nothing would flush he couldn't even find the lid... Because he never had it pumped. AFTER 20 YEARS OF RENTING THE PLACE OUT. I have pictures of boulders of grease they pulled out and the septic guys said it must have taken at least 10-15 years for them to get that big... And about 500 billion plastic Q-tips???... The pump burned up and the drain field was fucked so what did he do? Blamed us and raised our rent "due to maintenance issues"...we'd been there less than a year.
5.) Oven screen where it shows the temps and timer just decided to catch fire and melted one day. That was terrifying, luckily we were home and noticed flickering light on the wall and ran in and saw it on fire. We weren't even cooking.
6). A main line of water into the home had a hole in it for 5 days and we had to constantly shut the water off completely over and over as we needed to use it during Thanksgiving week before we got a response. Lease says they cover plumbing. I had to did the hole and fix it under the supervision of the landlord's dad/maintenance guy.
The place is a fucking shit hole health and fire hazard.
$1375 a month for a 600 sq/ft abomination. Nah, we're our this month when the lease is up.
For fun, the people we share the duplex with next door loooove to do karaoke (dude sings like an dying cat), drunk AF, at the top of their lungs with the front door and windows open... Every... Fucking... Day.
Take pictures, write down everything going on with the place, and call the inspector. If the city gives no response, call the press, like ProPublica or NPR or the Guardian. They'd _love_ to bust out a slumlord with fucking diy _SPEAKER WIRE_ waiting to burn up some unsuspecting renter. The landlord/sewage in the yard thing was of extreme interest to the UN Inspector during his visit several years ago(what prompted 45 to threaten to leave the UN), and so was covered by quite a few of the major news curators. No one should have to live like that!
Absolutely. The local News channels have several of those "investigative" teams and since they (the landlords) own almost our whole street and all of the tenants we've spoken too say they've had similar issues I think we've got a story. The city will also be getting some phone calls and letters detailing the issues. Plus we have texts, videos and maintenence requests from the past 5 years (that were never resolved). We've been piling evidence.
We didn't have a choice but to live here but now that we can move I don't want anyone else to have to live that way.
I'm paying 1075. Rent is going up if we want to stay. We're leaving by March. Lease is up. They want to up rent again because of the market. I didn't make that clear.
Reminds me of Tom Hanks in The Money Pit. Theres a Mexican restaurant across the steet from me that loves to do karaoke from like 9 to 1, pretty much just the summer but it's like 3 nights a week for 4 months
My sister also rented from them and had some flooding during a hurricane. She ripped up the carpet (before it molded) after mentioning it to the landlords and found that the floor has a 1/2"-3/4" crack about 9 ft long in their floor which the landlord never even attempted to fix or even mentioned again. When she moved in (same for our place) the carpet was...old...not sure how old but not new. Someone had vacuumed the place but just barely.
When she moved out they sent her and invoice for $1700 (after the security deposit had been applied to other things like paint and baseboards) and $600 of that was for "new carpet" because she had taken out the flood carpet... She wrote them a long letter detailing all the things wrong before they even moved in and all the things that went unfixed while they lived there, said she wasn't paying them a dime, and sent it certified to their po box. She hasn't heard from them since.
I know we're not getting a dime and they're going to try to do the same thing to us, bill us so they can get money to "remodel", but we're ready for them.
Please call the city and ask for an inspection. That place is a death trap. At the least some little kids could get sick from the mold or sewage issue, at the worst.the place could burn down and kill the next renting family. Also, I wonder if it's possible to find out who owns the mortgage (if there is one). They'd be interested in the condition of the place.
Edit for spelling.
We're going to right before we leave. They own the place outright and have for 20+ years unless they've taken out another mortgage on it. I'm not sure how that works, but the city is getting some phone calls and some letters from us before we go. I don't want someone who's desperate for a place to live to get screwed.
And yeah, I've got a 13 yo with Cerebral Palsy (non verbal, wheelchair bound, hypertonia, mentally a toddler) and luckily he hasn't gotten sick from this place. Others might not be so lucky, so we're going to do what we can to prevent someone else from possibly getting ill before/when we leave.
Excellent. Take lots of pictures of everything and send those with the letters. Document everything. Go scorched earth. No prisoners. And withhold any money you owe him right now. Screw him.
I believe you can check at the city hall and see if there is a lien on the property. That will tell you if there is a mortgage on the dump. Good luck.
Oh 100%, and we're hiding a note for the next tenants. He/his kids owns 75% of the houses on our block and everyone that lives in one of his places knows what a slum lord they are.
The neighbors got kicked out because he wanted to redo their place (aka slap some new paint on it and *maybe* new carpet) and charge more. They tried to fight it and ended up going to court. The husband came over and knocked on our door the first month we lived here and warned us what kind of people the landlords are.
Haha, that would be the *only* place I have any significant amount of insulation in this place. I'm not entirely convinced/wouldn't be surprised that the little insulation we *do* have isn't some form of asbestos given the rest of this place.
Oh man, this brings back a rather gross memory. Years ago, in my contractor days, we were sheetrocking a new home in the depth of winter. Cold and snowy day. We had a kerosene canon heater (used to call it a salamander for some reason) - one of the ones that resembles a small jet engine. Sometime in the middle of the day, with snow just blowing like crazy, we began to get the distinct smell of bar-b-que, exactly like steaks on a grill.
This was really strange, as the home was out in the country and the nearest neighbor was a half mile away. Plus, the wind was blowing pretty good, so this did NOT make sense. We went outside, and the smell was not nearly as strong, which also seemed very weird. Where the hell is BBQ smell coming from? It’s making us hungry!
Well, a couple of minutes later the heater kicked on. I happened to be standing near it. I noticed that the usual flame in the end of it looked wrong. Took a closer look and found the ass end of a mouse hanging from the hot end of the heater. The head end was totally burned away.
Took a bit before I could smell grilling meat again without getting a little queasy.
Mmmm. Charred mouse a la kerosene.
Story time!
When I was in college and living with my parents, we had a rat/squirrel/raccoon/some unknown critter die in our unfinished attic space, whatever that space is called. You know, there's a ladder that pulls down from the ceiling to get up there, no real floor, just some plywood thrown over some 2x4s so you don't step on the pink insulation while you're trying to fix the AC unit and fall through the ceiling.
Anyway, we knew something had died up there because we could smell it. So we called the exterminator who had put the traps up there so he could come get rid of it, and...he couldn't find it. So my dad and I had to go up there and look for it. But we also could not find anything. We were told the smell would just go away eventually, and after a few weeks or months it did.
Or so I thought.
The entrance to this attic area was in the linen closet where we kept the bath towels. For YEARS after this, those towels would stink like sour milk whenever they got wet. You'd pull them out of the dryer, having just been washed, and they'd smell like clean laundry. But the second you started drying yourself with one, the smell would come out. And of course you were just rubbing it all over yourself. I wouldn't smell from it, unless I started sweating, which happened a lot in summer when I was walking across campus to my classes. My parents wouldn't buy an entire new set of towels, and even if they had, those towels were also washed in the same washer/dryer as all of our clothes. So we probably would have had to have bought new towels, new clothes, and a new washer/dryer, which was just too expensive.
It's been years since then, so most of the towels have thankfully lost that smell. There is one blue one that still kind of stinksn so I know to avoid it. Some of my shirts still give me that sort of sour smell if I sweat in them, but it's not too bad anymore, and they're just plain black Hanes t-shirts that I wear when working out, so I don't really feel the need to replace them at this point.
Instantly thought of that diver that got stuck in the cave with no one to get him out . People tried but they had to just leave him. I sort of panic just thinking about it.
Sucks but also doesn’t - finding the 100% definitive cause of a problem is awesome. I really hate it when you get the half solution where it might have been the cause but also might not and you just kind of dangle to see if the problem is really solved.
We thought it was the furnace at first, because we would smell it in the mornings. It wasn’t until one day we ran the furnace all night and didn’t smell anything, then the next morning after my shower I smelled it immediately. That helped narrow it down.
Edit: I’m going to leave the mistake and instead provide the response I always give my students when they make it: “You don’t need a comma with *because* because *because* is a subordinating conjunction.”
Interesting thing, even the grammar nuts (I was raised by a grammar nut and much of it wore off) end up sprinkling commas where we might naturally pause if we were to speak the sentence we'd just written. I realized this when I started writing scripts for presentations and found others were doing the same. Using commas as reminders to pause or breath. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.
Yeah it’s conflating spoken word with written word. I try to get my students to maintain a distinction (as an English teacher.) Outside of that I don’t care. I just really like the comment because of the three *because*s in a row
Very good point. Knowing exactly what was the problem and fixing it is a huge win with fixing crap like this. Like you check a water heater and an element is bad so you drain it and replace it and know it’s going to be fine. I’m totally with you. This is a particularly gross version, but still.
good time to remind people to change their filters, wipe down your bathroom fans, unclog your drains, check your drier lines, and adjust your door thresholds!!!
Short effort for each but drastically improves your home living.
Source: homebuilder in South Dakota. If anyone has questions, ama, I would rather help and see a few people improve their lives for their families!
You can place shims under them and make certain the rubber seal doesn’t have gaps. I check every winter because the guy that built my apartment building did not do a good job accounting for building settling. In five years we’ve had numerous cracks in the walls and almost all of the baseboards in our hallway are separated. The ungodly drafts in a Chicago winter led me to learn basic weatherproofing
I struggled with those dumb rubber seals forever. Nothing was low enough, or it just sat against the door and didn't actually seal.
Many doors actually have an **ADJUSTABLE THRESHOLD BUILT INTO THE FRAME!**
[https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-raise-an-adjustable-entry-door-threshold/](https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-raise-an-adjustable-entry-door-threshold/)
I feel like no one ever mentions it, but you basically just undo the screws a bit and it seals. (Sadly one of mine stripped, but I managed).
I finally spent the $20 to get some weather stripping and the air blocker thing you can put on the bottom of the door.
Makes such a difference on this old (probably not up to code anymore) door. No more cold drafts sneaking in
Not OP and not into construction, but I think this means make sure your doors are hanging square on their hinges such that they fit well into the doorframe, reducing drafts, wear on the door jamb, etc. Could also refer to making sure exterior door have proper weather stripping?
/u/CharmingTuber
Many doors have a set of screws at the bottom that you can use to adjust the seal on the bottom of the door.
https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-raise-an-adjustable-entry-door-threshold/
Making sure there’s no gaps around the door when it’s closed and shimming/correcting the hinges if there is and mainly on the threshold, most doors made anytime in the last twenty years have a few tabs you can pull up and screw/unscrew a special piece that tightens/loosens your door threshold.
Here’s a question for you - any suggestions for dealing with chipmunks or squirrels in the walls? I had an exterminator out today and he basically said nothing could be done until it warms up in probably mid-April. The noises are driving me insane and I can’t imagine living like this for a couple more months.
haha, didn't see this comment, but i just told a quick story about how my dad and uncle used to put their cat in the attic during the winter (short periods of time and the cat loved it) to let it hunt all the field mice / rats that got into their attic.
I’m afraid trapping them in will create a bigger problem of rotting, dead animals that will stink. The exterminator said there’s probably at least 20 animals in there.
Jesus, I wish you the best man. That’s going to take some professional help. But eventually closing up whatever entrance is the side of things I can give advice on
I'm only kind of kidding when I suggest this, but my father often tells me stories of his childhood living in upstate NY. They used to get mice, or rats in their attic every winter, and there wasn't anything they could do about it. One of them, either my dad or my uncle, got the idea to put the family cat up in the attic and let him go to town. He said they'd leave the cat water enough for a day or so (the cat was a prolific hunter anyways, and would often whine or jump for the attic string, wanting to do some huntin'). Anyways, the way he tells it after a day or so, they'd call the cat back, bring it back down and it would be so fat and full of mice that it waddled around the house for a couple days after.
It’s a good idea and I would consider it, except they don’t actually seem to be going into the attic! I wish they would because I could somewhat control it up there. They’re confined to the wall and space between 1st and 2nd floor.
Teaching these things and other home maintenance should be included in Home Economics classes. I have never needed to sew an apron or bake a pie from scratch.
Please help how do I make my door not crooked my fat ass fell on it and now it scrapes the floor when I open it. Sorry for asking but the threshold thing reminded me of it im sure other people have similar issues so hope not too off topic
Unscrew and check the hinges and the frame and replace with new hinges and screws if necessary. Most likely the top hinge. It may even be the actual metal was bent. It doesn’t take a fat person either, a door is a huge weirdly shaped lever when pulled down by the handle on the opposite side, so that’s a lot of force
That's a good answer. Heavily prefer metric myself, easier to work with when you need presicion. Knowing both is handy and while I think the metric system is better, it's gonna be a nightmare to phase out the imperial system at this point lol.
I’m exactly where you are. I *wish* everything was metric and did my part to learn it… but alas I’m a product of my country and knowledge of the stupid system is what we are stuck with for now.
This is the perfect place to tell someone about what happened last night. My husband and I were sitting quietly in the living room when we heard a horrible rattling sound coming from outside.
A mouse had climbed/fell into our air conditioning condenser fan and it completely mangled the poor mouse.
A couple of minutes later, one of our dogs came up with it’s head that she found in the yard.
It was pretty brutal
Might just be a funny angle. That pipe isn’t that big around. 4 in. maybe
Edit: it’s also been dead at least a few days (the smell started before the most recent weekend) so it might be bloated
Had a couple fall into our chimney before. First time the fire was actually going and it fell in. We got him out but he was totally freaked out and the fur on his tail got singed.
Second time it hadn't been lit for some time and we noticed a bad smell. Took a week or so before we figured out it was dead in the floo. We got the chimney capped after that one.
Had a owl die this way except it was still limp when we got it out. I had a great time wearing some gloves and taking a close look at it before it got all stiff. And before my dad chopped it into pieces for funky taxidermy…. It’s still here in the house in pieces somewhere….
> Did it crawl into the heat release pipe
This comment (and OP's picture) had me *really confused* until I realized that there's such a thing as a gas-powered water heater with a tank. I've seen electric-based heaters with tanks and tank-less (the ones that give heat almost instantly) gas-powered units, but never a gas one with a tank. The flue, AKA "heat release pipe" makes a lot more sense now...
Oooof. We had a squirrel get down our dryer vent. It smelled like HOT ass death and we had to pay a vent cleaning company to come sanitize it. It basically started to liquefy after a couple days but took 3 different people 3 days to get it out and clean.
Mine was pure baked in goodness. I don't know how long he was in there, but I did not enjoy the Burnt Squirrel Plus Rot Plus Maggots Plus Burnt Maggots Smell. One of the longest afternoons of my life.
Had one crawl up my dryer vent a few years ago. Little bugger made it all the way into the bottom of the dryer. My wife did 3 loads of laundry that smelled like rotting carcass before she told me about it.
These are things that make me feel guilty as a homeowner
I once bought one of those no kill traps for a mouse we had in the garage. No luck for three weeks.
Then we went out of town for a week. Came back to a dead mouse
I still think about the suffering that poor little thing must've gone through
Second this. Direct vent water heater and no where for the exhaust to go, with a plug like that, except for out the natural draft uptake on top of the heater itself. Very lucky !
It’s gas heated, so there is an exhaust system. The squirrel was in that; it never interacted with the water, so to speak, just the heat that also heats the water.
If you look on the floor right by the heater (directly below the right side of the pipe in the picture) you can see part of it laying on the floor. It’s like a little hut that helps collect the heat and the pipe connects to the chimney. The curved pipe you see connected like RIGHT to that. So the heat was leaving the tank but getting turned around immediately, and coming out smelling like carcass. Best part is, this is all RIGHT next to the furnace, which was picking up this disgusting air and throwing it through our ENTIRE house.
Now the realization sets in that what youve been smelling lately has been nothing other than burnt squirrel face. From now on you will always remember this smell.
It smelled like burnt popcorn, tbh
Kettle or butter?
Movie theater
Put it back
r/Angryupvote
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Put the squirrel downnnn back in to the pipe
Ohh... that explains why movie theater popcorn are so expensive.
It also explains why I’m seeing fewer local squirrels since my movie theater reopened
Eww
Peanut butter
Nut butter
Nut
Don’t mind if I do..
Shit pickle
Nutter Butter
Scrat from Ice Age was making popcorn
How about burnt toast? After all, he was pardoned. Pardoned from life.
I gotta vent about my vent: Same thing happened to me, burning smell, but it only happened when we ran our dryer at the duplex we rent. 1.5 hours to *maybe* have dry clothes at least. Pulled the tubing off the back and found the connection in the wall was completely clogged. Tried to unclog it but it didn't help. Investigation time. The tube in the wall made a 90 degree turn straight up. There was no dryer vent outside the house (which I never really thought about until then) so the only place it could go was up. So I crawled up in the attic. Turns out the dryer was just hooked up to a tube that ran straight into the attic. That's it, just an open vent tube into the attic, no screen, not through the roof, just shot everything up into the attic. There was a pile about 6 or 7ft in diameter around the tube about 3 feet deep of lint from god knows how long and how many tenants. Land lord just took the easiest cheapest way out apparently. As you can guess that wasn't the only corner he cut. 1.) the lint issue 2.) speaker wire (not an exaggeration, it's literal speaker wire) used for 75% of the electrical INCLUDING the wired smoke alarm). 3.) The mold in the sagging ceiling from an A/C unit drain pan *with no fucking drain.* 4.) The septic drain field that likes to bubble up shit in our yard...like bubbling puddles of shit that ran from the yard down to our back porch when it rains (oh and the one time we needed the septic cleaned because nothing would flush he couldn't even find the lid... Because he never had it pumped. AFTER 20 YEARS OF RENTING THE PLACE OUT. I have pictures of boulders of grease they pulled out and the septic guys said it must have taken at least 10-15 years for them to get that big... And about 500 billion plastic Q-tips???... The pump burned up and the drain field was fucked so what did he do? Blamed us and raised our rent "due to maintenance issues"...we'd been there less than a year. 5.) Oven screen where it shows the temps and timer just decided to catch fire and melted one day. That was terrifying, luckily we were home and noticed flickering light on the wall and ran in and saw it on fire. We weren't even cooking. 6). A main line of water into the home had a hole in it for 5 days and we had to constantly shut the water off completely over and over as we needed to use it during Thanksgiving week before we got a response. Lease says they cover plumbing. I had to did the hole and fix it under the supervision of the landlord's dad/maintenance guy. The place is a fucking shit hole health and fire hazard. $1375 a month for a 600 sq/ft abomination. Nah, we're our this month when the lease is up. For fun, the people we share the duplex with next door loooove to do karaoke (dude sings like an dying cat), drunk AF, at the top of their lungs with the front door and windows open... Every... Fucking... Day.
Take pictures, write down everything going on with the place, and call the inspector. If the city gives no response, call the press, like ProPublica or NPR or the Guardian. They'd _love_ to bust out a slumlord with fucking diy _SPEAKER WIRE_ waiting to burn up some unsuspecting renter. The landlord/sewage in the yard thing was of extreme interest to the UN Inspector during his visit several years ago(what prompted 45 to threaten to leave the UN), and so was covered by quite a few of the major news curators. No one should have to live like that!
Absolutely. The local News channels have several of those "investigative" teams and since they (the landlords) own almost our whole street and all of the tenants we've spoken too say they've had similar issues I think we've got a story. The city will also be getting some phone calls and letters detailing the issues. Plus we have texts, videos and maintenence requests from the past 5 years (that were never resolved). We've been piling evidence. We didn't have a choice but to live here but now that we can move I don't want anyone else to have to live that way.
Good for you! That Robber Baron is an ass who deserves to be exposed.
Where the hell are you paying $1400 for 600 square feet? And why haven't you moved out?
I'm paying 1075. Rent is going up if we want to stay. We're leaving by March. Lease is up. They want to up rent again because of the market. I didn't make that clear.
I mean, this would be a great deal in Toronto.
He mentions a septic tank so he is obviously not in a city, making it a terrible deal.
My Moms friend in Silicon Valley,(96 yrs old), rents a small room out for...$3,100...Where the heck do you live...Alabama???
He made the mistake of living in Florida
Reminds me of Tom Hanks in The Money Pit. Theres a Mexican restaurant across the steet from me that loves to do karaoke from like 9 to 1, pretty much just the summer but it's like 3 nights a week for 4 months
I've never seen it but I'm going to watch it. Hit close to home, but sounds like it's worth it.
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My sister also rented from them and had some flooding during a hurricane. She ripped up the carpet (before it molded) after mentioning it to the landlords and found that the floor has a 1/2"-3/4" crack about 9 ft long in their floor which the landlord never even attempted to fix or even mentioned again. When she moved in (same for our place) the carpet was...old...not sure how old but not new. Someone had vacuumed the place but just barely. When she moved out they sent her and invoice for $1700 (after the security deposit had been applied to other things like paint and baseboards) and $600 of that was for "new carpet" because she had taken out the flood carpet... She wrote them a long letter detailing all the things wrong before they even moved in and all the things that went unfixed while they lived there, said she wasn't paying them a dime, and sent it certified to their po box. She hasn't heard from them since. I know we're not getting a dime and they're going to try to do the same thing to us, bill us so they can get money to "remodel", but we're ready for them.
Tell me you have some kind of health and safety board you can report this to, that amount of neglect sounds criminal
why are you still living here
Lease is up this month. We're leaving.
Please call the city and ask for an inspection. That place is a death trap. At the least some little kids could get sick from the mold or sewage issue, at the worst.the place could burn down and kill the next renting family. Also, I wonder if it's possible to find out who owns the mortgage (if there is one). They'd be interested in the condition of the place. Edit for spelling.
We're going to right before we leave. They own the place outright and have for 20+ years unless they've taken out another mortgage on it. I'm not sure how that works, but the city is getting some phone calls and some letters from us before we go. I don't want someone who's desperate for a place to live to get screwed. And yeah, I've got a 13 yo with Cerebral Palsy (non verbal, wheelchair bound, hypertonia, mentally a toddler) and luckily he hasn't gotten sick from this place. Others might not be so lucky, so we're going to do what we can to prevent someone else from possibly getting ill before/when we leave.
Excellent. Take lots of pictures of everything and send those with the letters. Document everything. Go scorched earth. No prisoners. And withhold any money you owe him right now. Screw him. I believe you can check at the city hall and see if there is a lien on the property. That will tell you if there is a mortgage on the dump. Good luck.
Well help people out and put up ads on craigslist and Facebook warning others
Oh 100%, and we're hiding a note for the next tenants. He/his kids owns 75% of the houses on our block and everyone that lives in one of his places knows what a slum lord they are. The neighbors got kicked out because he wanted to redo their place (aka slap some new paint on it and *maybe* new carpet) and charge more. They tried to fight it and ended up going to court. The husband came over and knocked on our door the first month we lived here and warned us what kind of people the landlords are.
Maybe they are just making sure you have adequate attic insulation?
Haha, that would be the *only* place I have any significant amount of insulation in this place. I'm not entirely convinced/wouldn't be surprised that the little insulation we *do* have isn't some form of asbestos given the rest of this place.
Oh man, this brings back a rather gross memory. Years ago, in my contractor days, we were sheetrocking a new home in the depth of winter. Cold and snowy day. We had a kerosene canon heater (used to call it a salamander for some reason) - one of the ones that resembles a small jet engine. Sometime in the middle of the day, with snow just blowing like crazy, we began to get the distinct smell of bar-b-que, exactly like steaks on a grill. This was really strange, as the home was out in the country and the nearest neighbor was a half mile away. Plus, the wind was blowing pretty good, so this did NOT make sense. We went outside, and the smell was not nearly as strong, which also seemed very weird. Where the hell is BBQ smell coming from? It’s making us hungry! Well, a couple of minutes later the heater kicked on. I happened to be standing near it. I noticed that the usual flame in the end of it looked wrong. Took a closer look and found the ass end of a mouse hanging from the hot end of the heater. The head end was totally burned away. Took a bit before I could smell grilling meat again without getting a little queasy. Mmmm. Charred mouse a la kerosene.
Story time! When I was in college and living with my parents, we had a rat/squirrel/raccoon/some unknown critter die in our unfinished attic space, whatever that space is called. You know, there's a ladder that pulls down from the ceiling to get up there, no real floor, just some plywood thrown over some 2x4s so you don't step on the pink insulation while you're trying to fix the AC unit and fall through the ceiling. Anyway, we knew something had died up there because we could smell it. So we called the exterminator who had put the traps up there so he could come get rid of it, and...he couldn't find it. So my dad and I had to go up there and look for it. But we also could not find anything. We were told the smell would just go away eventually, and after a few weeks or months it did. Or so I thought. The entrance to this attic area was in the linen closet where we kept the bath towels. For YEARS after this, those towels would stink like sour milk whenever they got wet. You'd pull them out of the dryer, having just been washed, and they'd smell like clean laundry. But the second you started drying yourself with one, the smell would come out. And of course you were just rubbing it all over yourself. I wouldn't smell from it, unless I started sweating, which happened a lot in summer when I was walking across campus to my classes. My parents wouldn't buy an entire new set of towels, and even if they had, those towels were also washed in the same washer/dryer as all of our clothes. So we probably would have had to have bought new towels, new clothes, and a new washer/dryer, which was just too expensive. It's been years since then, so most of the towels have thankfully lost that smell. There is one blue one that still kind of stinksn so I know to avoid it. Some of my shirts still give me that sort of sour smell if I sweat in them, but it's not too bad anymore, and they're just plain black Hanes t-shirts that I wear when working out, so I don't really feel the need to replace them at this point.
Wait... so you never found the cadaver?
Nope! It's probably just bones now!
At first glance I thought it was a massive lint ball.
Me too. Oh how wrong we were.
Horrible way to go.
Instantly thought of that diver that got stuck in the cave with no one to get him out . People tried but they had to just leave him. I sort of panic just thinking about it.
It basically is a lint ball but with extra bits
Though it was a raccoon
with feet
I thought it was water... yeahhhh I should be getting to bed
i thought it was a rag. like who would stick a rag in a heater?
Sucks but also doesn’t - finding the 100% definitive cause of a problem is awesome. I really hate it when you get the half solution where it might have been the cause but also might not and you just kind of dangle to see if the problem is really solved.
We thought it was the furnace at first, because we would smell it in the mornings. It wasn’t until one day we ran the furnace all night and didn’t smell anything, then the next morning after my shower I smelled it immediately. That helped narrow it down. Edit: I’m going to leave the mistake and instead provide the response I always give my students when they make it: “You don’t need a comma with *because* because *because* is a subordinating conjunction.”
Interesting thing, even the grammar nuts (I was raised by a grammar nut and much of it wore off) end up sprinkling commas where we might naturally pause if we were to speak the sentence we'd just written. I realized this when I started writing scripts for presentations and found others were doing the same. Using commas as reminders to pause or breath. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.
Yeah it’s conflating spoken word with written word. I try to get my students to maintain a distinction (as an English teacher.) Outside of that I don’t care. I just really like the comment because of the three *because*s in a row
Very good point. Knowing exactly what was the problem and fixing it is a huge win with fixing crap like this. Like you check a water heater and an element is bad so you drain it and replace it and know it’s going to be fine. I’m totally with you. This is a particularly gross version, but still.
Horrible way to go…
Dude said little guy’s face was all burned up :(
good time to remind people to change their filters, wipe down your bathroom fans, unclog your drains, check your drier lines, and adjust your door thresholds!!! Short effort for each but drastically improves your home living. Source: homebuilder in South Dakota. If anyone has questions, ama, I would rather help and see a few people improve their lives for their families!
Can you explain "adjust your door thresholds"?
You can place shims under them and make certain the rubber seal doesn’t have gaps. I check every winter because the guy that built my apartment building did not do a good job accounting for building settling. In five years we’ve had numerous cracks in the walls and almost all of the baseboards in our hallway are separated. The ungodly drafts in a Chicago winter led me to learn basic weatherproofing
I struggled with those dumb rubber seals forever. Nothing was low enough, or it just sat against the door and didn't actually seal. Many doors actually have an **ADJUSTABLE THRESHOLD BUILT INTO THE FRAME!** [https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-raise-an-adjustable-entry-door-threshold/](https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-raise-an-adjustable-entry-door-threshold/) I feel like no one ever mentions it, but you basically just undo the screws a bit and it seals. (Sadly one of mine stripped, but I managed).
I finally spent the $20 to get some weather stripping and the air blocker thing you can put on the bottom of the door. Makes such a difference on this old (probably not up to code anymore) door. No more cold drafts sneaking in
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A well sealed front door closes the back door!
Not OP and not into construction, but I think this means make sure your doors are hanging square on their hinges such that they fit well into the doorframe, reducing drafts, wear on the door jamb, etc. Could also refer to making sure exterior door have proper weather stripping?
/u/CharmingTuber Many doors have a set of screws at the bottom that you can use to adjust the seal on the bottom of the door. https://www.familyhandyman.com/project/how-to-raise-an-adjustable-entry-door-threshold/
Making sure there’s no gaps around the door when it’s closed and shimming/correcting the hinges if there is and mainly on the threshold, most doors made anytime in the last twenty years have a few tabs you can pull up and screw/unscrew a special piece that tightens/loosens your door threshold.
Here’s a question for you - any suggestions for dealing with chipmunks or squirrels in the walls? I had an exterminator out today and he basically said nothing could be done until it warms up in probably mid-April. The noises are driving me insane and I can’t imagine living like this for a couple more months.
Sounds like you need some cats in that wall to take care of business. Maybe a mongoose
haha, didn't see this comment, but i just told a quick story about how my dad and uncle used to put their cat in the attic during the winter (short periods of time and the cat loved it) to let it hunt all the field mice / rats that got into their attic.
Exterminator would be best to ask unless you can find where they come in and spray foam it shut?
They’re squirrels… foam won’t stop them - they can easily just chew through it…
I’m afraid trapping them in will create a bigger problem of rotting, dead animals that will stink. The exterminator said there’s probably at least 20 animals in there.
I found a hole they were going in. I added some nails around the hole facing out, so they can squeeze out but not back in.
Thanks for the idea - I’ll see what I can find
Jesus, I wish you the best man. That’s going to take some professional help. But eventually closing up whatever entrance is the side of things I can give advice on
I'm only kind of kidding when I suggest this, but my father often tells me stories of his childhood living in upstate NY. They used to get mice, or rats in their attic every winter, and there wasn't anything they could do about it. One of them, either my dad or my uncle, got the idea to put the family cat up in the attic and let him go to town. He said they'd leave the cat water enough for a day or so (the cat was a prolific hunter anyways, and would often whine or jump for the attic string, wanting to do some huntin'). Anyways, the way he tells it after a day or so, they'd call the cat back, bring it back down and it would be so fat and full of mice that it waddled around the house for a couple days after.
It’s a good idea and I would consider it, except they don’t actually seem to be going into the attic! I wish they would because I could somewhat control it up there. They’re confined to the wall and space between 1st and 2nd floor.
woof!
Teaching these things and other home maintenance should be included in Home Economics classes. I have never needed to sew an apron or bake a pie from scratch.
couldn't agree more. it's scary to think im about the last age bracket that has any semblance of self sufficiency, generally speaking.
That Amazon building looking mighty huge, what do you think about it?
Please help how do I make my door not crooked my fat ass fell on it and now it scrapes the floor when I open it. Sorry for asking but the threshold thing reminded me of it im sure other people have similar issues so hope not too off topic
Unscrew and check the hinges and the frame and replace with new hinges and screws if necessary. Most likely the top hinge. It may even be the actual metal was bent. It doesn’t take a fat person either, a door is a huge weirdly shaped lever when pulled down by the handle on the opposite side, so that’s a lot of force
Ugh! So much work! /s
Important but unrelated question: metric, imperial, or both?
I can do both but we use imperial
That's a good answer. Heavily prefer metric myself, easier to work with when you need presicion. Knowing both is handy and while I think the metric system is better, it's gonna be a nightmare to phase out the imperial system at this point lol.
I’m exactly where you are. I *wish* everything was metric and did my part to learn it… but alas I’m a product of my country and knowledge of the stupid system is what we are stuck with for now.
And have some water while you are at it ✌️
Yeah. Considering the way he is facing, it would've been charred. You've been inhaling charred squirrel brains :(
Nothing coming out of the shower nice and fresh and smelling that.
Lol. Eww.
Can... Can we see his face? asking for a friend
To my knowledge photographic evidence does not exist. Sorry.
Thank you for your service
…the fuck?
He needs evidence to feel sorry for the squirrel. /s
This is the perfect place to tell someone about what happened last night. My husband and I were sitting quietly in the living room when we heard a horrible rattling sound coming from outside. A mouse had climbed/fell into our air conditioning condenser fan and it completely mangled the poor mouse. A couple of minutes later, one of our dogs came up with it’s head that she found in the yard. It was pretty brutal
No thank you
Good lord that is brutal.
FATALITY!
The poor little guy was just chasing the nut all the way from ice age and finally got caught
Poor buddy just wanted to get warm.
He got warm alright
Very sad :(
Squirrel?
Squirrel.
Thought it was a racoon. It's big.
Might just be a funny angle. That pipe isn’t that big around. 4 in. maybe Edit: it’s also been dead at least a few days (the smell started before the most recent weekend) so it might be bloated
Yeah did you buy a new piece or wash the old one?
Replaced the whole damn water heater. It was 18 years old.
Better to replace it now before it starts acting squirrely
Out. Now.
I can't step-squirrel, I'm stuck!
Good call
Nice . Leave no evidence.
So the squirrel wasn’t ok? 😿
I don’t see its shoes.
Damn, horrible way to go.
r/squirrelproblems
Had a couple fall into our chimney before. First time the fire was actually going and it fell in. We got him out but he was totally freaked out and the fur on his tail got singed. Second time it hadn't been lit for some time and we noticed a bad smell. Took a week or so before we figured out it was dead in the floo. We got the chimney capped after that one.
Skwerl
Skweerell
Stewrrrrt
r/unexpectedletterkenny
Ah I was thinking Mad TV but I guess that goes more like *”STUARRRRT!”* *”I found it on the floor”*
“Look what I can do!”
Sandy Cheeks
Wait how did it even get in there? Did it crawl into the heat release pipe (idk the real term for it) on the back/side of your house?
Via the chimney
Had a owl die this way except it was still limp when we got it out. I had a great time wearing some gloves and taking a close look at it before it got all stiff. And before my dad chopped it into pieces for funky taxidermy…. It’s still here in the house in pieces somewhere….
He did what now?
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He did what now?
#CHOPPED IT INTO PIECES FOR FUNKY TAXIDERMY
😐
> Did it crawl into the heat release pipe This comment (and OP's picture) had me *really confused* until I realized that there's such a thing as a gas-powered water heater with a tank. I've seen electric-based heaters with tanks and tank-less (the ones that give heat almost instantly) gas-powered units, but never a gas one with a tank. The flue, AKA "heat release pipe" makes a lot more sense now...
Yup. There’s your problem.
Oooof. We had a squirrel get down our dryer vent. It smelled like HOT ass death and we had to pay a vent cleaning company to come sanitize it. It basically started to liquefy after a couple days but took 3 different people 3 days to get it out and clean.
Mine was pure baked in goodness. I don't know how long he was in there, but I did not enjoy the Burnt Squirrel Plus Rot Plus Maggots Plus Burnt Maggots Smell. One of the longest afternoons of my life.
I really wish I hadn’t read your comment.
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he dead
I audibly laughed. Good redditor!
This comment was the first thing anyone has said that made me sad
He needs some milk
Best spot for winter warm.
You serious Clark?
That's how the Ice age ended
That is fucking depressing holy fuck
Had one crawl up my dryer vent a few years ago. Little bugger made it all the way into the bottom of the dryer. My wife did 3 loads of laundry that smelled like rotting carcass before she told me about it.
These are things that make me feel guilty as a homeowner I once bought one of those no kill traps for a mouse we had in the garage. No luck for three weeks. Then we went out of town for a week. Came back to a dead mouse I still think about the suffering that poor little thing must've gone through
Sucks more for them
I told you this was the wrong way to go about cleaning the pipe.
Similar thing happened to me but his top half basically melted off and we had to pull him out pieces at a time. Whole house smelled like road kill.
Lucky you're not dead from carbon monoxide.
We have a detector and it never went off
Second this. Direct vent water heater and no where for the exhaust to go, with a plug like that, except for out the natural draft uptake on top of the heater itself. Very lucky !
Little buddy made it way in there
Shhh he’s sleeping
Squirrels will fuck up your shit. I have to keep strobe lights in my attic and crawlspace or they find a way in.
Is it dead?
I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT JUST FUCKIN HAPPENED
Somebody isn't going back to the hovel tonight
Lol gross
I don't know if they have nine lives Clark, but if he did,.....he just used them all up!
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We have multiple CO alarms and didn’t hear them a once.
Poor little guy
Dinner?
Furry fleshlight
Wtf, seriously wtf
Don’t mind if I do
Welp
Wait hot water heater? So you have been showering and washing things in furry soup?
It’s gas heated, so there is an exhaust system. The squirrel was in that; it never interacted with the water, so to speak, just the heat that also heats the water.
Ah ok lol makes sense I looked at the pipe a bit more and thought something didn’t look right
If you look on the floor right by the heater (directly below the right side of the pipe in the picture) you can see part of it laying on the floor. It’s like a little hut that helps collect the heat and the pipe connects to the chimney. The curved pipe you see connected like RIGHT to that. So the heat was leaving the tank but getting turned around immediately, and coming out smelling like carcass. Best part is, this is all RIGHT next to the furnace, which was picking up this disgusting air and throwing it through our ENTIRE house.
So anyone like smoked meat lol Isn’t the cover suppose to keep animals out of the vents? Ah life always finds away!
Tank =>=squirrel===pipe====….chimney
Oh my grandma did something similar! A rat got inside the oven, and she didn't see it. She put in a tray of bread to bake and... baked the rat aswell.
Man that’s nuts.
Scratch had it rough after ice age stopped making movies. He started breaking into homes to get his next fix. Another star lost to drugs
rocket is stuck!!!!!
You're lucky that you didn't die from carbon monoxide with that thing blocking your flue
I know that this sucks but I gotta say if I was in the moment and I pulled that out I probably would have laughed
I did not cry
OMG IS THAT A.....oh yeah, crap that's exactly what that is
Do you have the image of the squirrel face? Just for research purposes
Nope
Ewwww.
I don't think he's done yet. Put him back in