Crap-uscule stinks in my garden. At this point I'm keeping it for the clematis to climb up, but gee, chicken wire works good for that and doesn't flick its nose at me when I walk by. The ball and crisp twins - Souv de Francois Gaulain & Enchantress - have begun to have an unappealing smell as well. As for me, I hang onto the poor performers because giving up on them leaves gaping holes in the garden. Especially in the front garden removing the twins would be like going to the prom minus a couple of front teeth. It makes me want to always have a few full grown spares at the ready to plop into the voids left by the failures. Giving a rose time is a lovely gesture of fairness that results in a garden in continual upheaval and undoneness. Exasperating! Sherry Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

I swear, there is a plumbing curse on my hubby's family. The stories I could tell,,, but I digress. In our 25+ year old house, a few years ago we would randomly get a terrible odor in our master bath. I never could track down where it came from, but sometimes it came from the vanity sink drains upon running water, first thing in the morning, Sometimes I could track it down to the shower stall drain. Some days, I could not tell where it was coming from. It was not a daily thing, but when it happened, it was awful. I finally had our plumbers come out, since I was 100% certain it was sewer gases. They were appalled at how that bathroom sewer lines were plumbed (under the house). They went into the attic and could not find any problems with the sewer vent pipe. They suggested I let them re-work all the sewer lines under the house, for that bath only. I completely trust them, so I did. After that, we've had no more problems. WHY it took almost 25 years for the problem to get bad, I don't know. Those MB vanity sink drains were always a little funky, for the 20 years we've lived in the house. They're fine now. We don't have the problem since having the pipes under the house re-designed/re-done. I really think yours is a plumbing problem and the odor is sewer gas. I only know of our own experiences and am not in the business nor an expert. Even on septic, you'll have sewer gas vents coming up out of your roof - usually PVC spray-painted black. Have a really good and reputable plumber come take a look at it.

The reason one window in the bedroom is operable is in order to meet the code requirement for an emergency escape and rescue opening in all bedrooms. I have many times advised homeowners on the GW to not allow a builder to use the cryptic convention of using 60 to mean 72" or 6'-0" on the elevation drawings. (By the way, in my experience, 60 means 72" as silly as that seems) All window sizes should be dimensioned in rough opening feet - inches for the benefit of the framer. All windows should be specified separately for the benefit of the supplier in a Window Schedule that shows the manufacturer, model, rough opening, glass type, color, mullions, hardware, etc. Otherwise you are asking for mistakes. You might ask the GC where the horizontal mullion/sash rail is in the middle of the windows that were ordered for the front of the house. Something stinks; I think someone is making you take responsibility for their unprofessional mistakes. I not only provide clients with window schedules, I insist on reviewing the order before it is submitted which is a tedious and thankless job since all manufacturers use different cryptic conventions for their order sheets. I have never checked an order where there wasn't a mistake and some of them would have been very expensive to correct after delivery. Sometimes a window manufacturer will make a mistake with a correct order but that can be corrected at no cost to the owner. The issue here is documentation. If the correct windows were documented all errors should be corrected at no cost to the owner with no debate. I should also add that in the past 40 years I've known only one GC to order through a lumberyard/box store instead of a wholesale window supplier and the resulting mistakes in that order were the worst I've ever seen.

That's an awesome idea, dgmarie. I'm going to try that! Deborah - isn't it frustrating? The downstairs fridge doesn't have an ice maker and I'm 100% sure it isn't fridge related since we scoured that thing and the smell is better over by the fridge than in is in the mysterious no man's land middle of the room. I just went and got a more powerful dehumidifier and I'm going to try to take the relative humidity down to 35 instead of 50 and see if that has any effect. The towel idea is great though, so I'm going to set up lots of little smell traps too.