My poor boyfriend has some kind of skunk infestation around/under his house somewhere. When I arrived, he came to greet me in the street and he smelled like a skunk. When I walked inside, it was like I was walking underwater in a nightmare. I hit a wall of stench so bad it burned my eyes and made me nauseous.
He has not found any footprint-in-snow evidence of skunks around the house, so all I can think is that there are skunks under the house somewhere in some kind of crawl space?
Has anyone ever gone through this? I don’t know how he’ll be able to get the smell out of the house. When I went home, every stitch of my clothing went straight into the wash, and I into the shower.
That’s true. I thought maybe I had a skunk under the house and it turned out to be a propane leak. Fortunately, it was summer adn the doors adn windows were open, so the gas didn’t build up.
A co-worker had a skunk under her house this winter. She hired a professional remover and had to do about $1500 in repairs to ventwork and insulation. She didn’t find out about it the hard way, though - she saw it go under and called someone out right away. It takes a good deal for a skunk to spray. I went out one morning and 5 of my dogs were surrounding a skunk in my backyard. The skunk wasn’t happy, but hadn’t sprayed. I called the dogs off and the skunk went on his way.
But maybe not. Maybe a skunk sprayed outside or under the house and that’s all. If you can find the spot there are deoderizers. As for the stuff in the house, it can take a long time to get rid of that smell completely. One of our dogs got skunked in the middle of the night and we put her in the garage until morning when we could go get tomato juice (yes, it works on dogs). There was a pile of empty mail bags there. She couldn’t have touched them directly, but the smell stuck. I sprayed a bunch of deoderizer on them but it just wouldn’t go away. I took them back to the Post Office and told them what happened, and they just laughed.
I worry because he’s an “I’ll figure this out on my own” kind of guy who won’t spend money hiring a professional. So I have a feeling all he’s going to do is to set a trap and if he catches it, then it won’t spray again. But how will he get the smell out of the house??
I’m trying not to be a nag, but my opinion is that the longer he lets it go, the worse it’s going to get, and the longer it will take to get the smell out. I was there last week and it was already bad. Last night it was unbearable.
The bad thing is that I really don’t want to go back there while it’s this bad. And he doesn’t live close to me. So I have to decide how badly I want to see him.
My mom had a similar situation, sort of. This was several years ago. She had called me, to see if I would come over to her house, because she smelled something. I went, and I sort of smelled it, too. I thought it was a skunk. After a few days, you could smell it outside the house, and the neighbors said it was a gas leak.
My husband went over there, and the first thing he said, was that something had died.
A couple more days went by, and the neighbors were concerned about having a gas leak so close to their house, came to talk to my mom about it, to convince her to call someone to check it. My mom called the gas company.
Well, when the gas company guy arrived, he could smell it, too. Really strongly. He assumed there was a leak, also. He proceeded to crawl under the house. After a short time, he came back out. He had found a dead possum under there. It was quite a large one, apparently. He had to come out from under there, to get a mask, because the smell was so bad. Eventually, after collecting all the pieces of it (It was really starting to decompose. It exploded when he grabbed it, and that didn’t help matters.) he removed it, retching the entire time. He even vomited once. It was a nasty, nasty situation.
Even though mom didn’t have to, she still gave him $100 for his trouble, and for being kind enough to do what he did.
See, I was thinking the exact opposite. He’s the gas company guy, not the dead possum removal guy. He could have just as easily said “Lady, get somebody to remove that for you” and walked away. I would feel pretty obligated to give him some money after he went to such pains to help me out.
Exactly! I sure as hell wasn’t going to go get it, since I had no idea it was anything dead, anyway. My husband figured it was something dead, but he had to leave for work, so he didn’t want to go after it, either.
It was well worth the $100!
The stench lasted a couple more days, and then it started to fade. It was totally gone in a little over a week.
Well, that, or he has to decide how badly he wants to see you.
'cause I could totally see saying, “I’m sorry, but I can’t handle the stench. It’s making me ill. Maybe you’d better come see me until you get rid of the skunk and the stink.”
And there’s no old gas line for a stove that someone could have kicked by accident?
Also, does he have a cat? If so, the cat could have left a decomposing present under the sofa or something. This happened to me once – I walked into the living room and thought “Hey, how come this room smells like a salt marsh at low tide?” Then I found the (long) dead mouse under the TV. Thank you, cat.
Absolutely, and at this point I’m sure he’ll be happy to come and see me to get away from it. We’ve had this arrangement because we don’t live close that we switch off on who travels every weekend, to keep it fair. Luckily we’re traveling this weekend, and I may suggest that he comes to me next weekend!
No cat, I’ll suggest gas (although we all would have been dead if it were really gas- it’s that bad), and also the possibility of a dead skunk under the house
The weird thing is that you can hardly smell it outside, if at all (but it’s been pretty cold), and inside it’s like SKUNK IN YOUR PORES