The smell in the living room

*Sniff, sniff* I could smell something in the living room, something bad.  It smelled like fish.  Off fish, fermenting in the living room.  The smell was atrocious, like a slimy wet dead fish crawled over to my nose and started smacking me with its rotting tail.

“It smells like off fish in here.  Can you smell it?  It’s disgusting!  Why does it smell like that?!?!”  I babbled to Aaron.

*Sniff, sniff* “I don’t smell anything.”

“Are you serious??????  How can you not smell that?”  Well, I do have an incredibly good sense of smell.   I can tell if a neighbour is smoking a cigarette even when I’m inside the house with the windows shut.

We ate dinner.  I could still smell the fish.

“Seriously, you don’t smell that?”

“I guess I can now, a little bit”  Aaron said.

“Ok, tomorrow when Hannah is asleep, I’m going to use my hound-dog nose and find the source of that smell.”

“Why wait, let’s do it now.”

Aaron moved the lounge.  He laughed.

“What?  You found the remote didn’t you?”  We’ve been looking for the remote for months.  We did look behind the couch, but it wasn’t there.  It must have been caught in the hide-a-bed and then fallen out the back later.  I knew we should have opened up the couch to look for it (but we were being lazy).

I vacuumed behind the couch while it was out.  No smell causing source there.

I got down on my hands and knees again, sniffing the ground as I went.  The smell seemed to be coming from near the couch, but not the couch itself.  I touched the carpet as I sniffed, maybe there was some sticky hard to see thing causing the ruckus.  Plus the brown carpet seems to camouflage anything and everything.  Then I vacuumed.

Something little caught my eye.  “I think this is it,” I said after taking a whiff.  It appeared to be a tiny piece of salmon that was now hard, that had fallen off someones dinner plate (probably Aaron’s, it was on his side of the couch.  That’s surprising though, considering I’m the sloppy one who is always spilling things).

I threw it away and vacuumed the area.

Ugh, the smell was still there!

The next day (yesterday), I vacuumed the whole house, taking extra care in the living room, moving anything and everything to vacuum underneath.  The room still smelled. Yuck.

I went to the shops and bought one of those oil things in a bottle with the sticks coming out to freshen up the room, vanilla scented.  Ok, to cover up the still un-found fish smell.  I tried to smell it in the shops, but it was all sealed up.

When I opened it, I took a whiff.  Ugh.  It certainly didn’t smell like vanilla.  It was more like cheap, imitation, sickly sweet cinnamon.  Not even a hint of vanilla.  Oh well, I put it out anyway.  couldn’t  be worse than the fish smell.

Except now the room smells like off fish and cheap, imitation, sickly sweet cinnamon.  And I still can’t find the source of the smell.  Humph.  Maybe if we wait long enough, it will go away on its own.  That or it will get worse and take over the house.  I’m hoping for the former.