Our small apartment has a utility closet directly when you enter from the hallway. One must turn right to walk through the galley kitchen into the living room, or further right for the hallway to the bath or bedroom. This narrow walk-in closet has our hot water heater and electrical panel. There's a sliding pocket door that's seldom closed completely. We use the room for shoe storage. It has useful shelving that a friend, Joel Thomas, installed decades ago. The space is useful for luggage and junk storage. The vacuum cleaner and brooms sit inside. A small stool helps when putting on shoes and a plastic milk cube sits under it for miscellaneous items such as used batteries for recycling, etc.
I needed into to relay all this because of something a bit disgusting that we solved today.
Sunday, July 27 - We did a bit of grocery shopping after being away for most of the week on a road trip. We got bananas, a half dozen fresh corn on the cob, and three or four lbs. of skinless, boneless chicken breast on a Styrofoam pack.
Monday, July 28 - Jay suggested that my sandals may have gotten sweaty and needed to be washed.
Tuesday, July 29 - I washed the sandals but a faint bad odor was still present in the closet area.
Wednesday, July 30 - The utility room started to smell as though something had died inside. As there's an emergency pipe for the hot water tank, I was assured that something had died some floor below us. I surely hoped there wasn't mold in the wall or someplace. I picked up a bottle of Febreze and we took all the movable items outside to the balcony and cleaned the floor and shelving. I even opened stored luggage in case something had gotten inside.
Thursday, July 31 - The smell was now worse. It was rather sickening because the scent of Febreze and foul odor had combined. Today, we were recovering from our second Shingrix vaccinations. We both needed to nap in the morning and afternoon because of a fever and aches. To add insult to injury, the smell was not diminishing. We took the entire shoe shelves outside and put them on the balcony. We washed the floor again. We checked all the items but couldn't locate a source. Lastly, I noticed the plastic milk cube under the stool might be the problem. We carried it outside on the balcony too. Apparently, I'd tripped on the bloody Styrofoam tray earlier in the week. I must have slid it under stool. We'd not disposed of it down our floor's garbage chute as we always do.
Ah ha! It was the stench of dead animal. Thankfully, the room smells of only Febreze now!