Usually just turning on heat/ac will solve the problem and the realtor should take time to do so if this is a truly "stale" house. A good airing would also work but would take far longer.

This is a great question! we bought a house that had a funky smell and are moving in a week. I'm worried. we had ceiling scraped and refinished, carpet removed, refinished all the wood floors... yet the odor seems to still linger. don't know what else to do i think it's the raised foundation.

keep a ceiling fan going to keep the air from getting stagnant. Don't know if this is tried and true but it works in my moms small apartment

From a neighbor that worked for a company that cleaned out houses after people died in them place coffee grounds in shallow pans. I was told in the worst houses the grounds were replaced a couple of times a day. If you have ever gone into a scent shop the ones that cared about what their customers were smelling and wanted to make more sales will have containers of coffee either ground or beans in containers to be sniffed while trying the various scents. You would have to remove before a showing but better than that funky smell.

maifleur01--

I would like to try that suggestion; fresh coffee grounds or brewed?

melle it was never said. I believe it was dry as that would be the easiest type to use. If anyone has a coffee shop in your area that gives away used grounds they could experiment. However in this area of high humidity coffee grounds that I have saved to put in the compost but forgot will become moldy in a couple of days if it takes that long so I would stick to dry.

brewed

(but we're not in high humidity area)

DRY!

I'll watch for a fresh bag of grounds at Starbucks and then dry them before trying the experiment. Thanks for the suggestions.

We rented a Condo in Florida (Full concrete Pulte built high ceilings) but near the water-heater area which was near the kitchen we always had a funky smell. We suspected something with moisture near the water heater but the smell was evident only in this area. No visible leaks either. Worth checking into mold/moisture/water leaks.

Whatever you do, dont try to cover it up with some stinky chemical fragrance. That stuff does NOT smell like Summer Rain or Mountain Breeze, contrary to what they want you to believe. It just smells like a chemical, like whatevver they use in public toilets to cover up odors. I went to a place once where they had some spicy thing going, like its supposed to smell like Mom's got something baking in the oven - but it really was just a chemical - yuck. People can tell the difference between real and fake, and we will wonder what you are trying to cover up.

I was reminded of a certain scene in Breaking Bad.....

I

I know what you mean by fake scents... not for me. I think I will buy a can of coffee and put it out while I'm gone as an experiment. I'll have to report how well it works. Or.... is that just a smell covering up the odor. I'll see.

Here in Nebraska we have basements, and usually that's where the 'furnace room' is located (ours has the furnace, the water heater, various pipes and a big drain in the middle of the floor) but it's the floor drain in there that can start to get a sort of sour smell if it's dried out for whatever reason...My parents' have had a sewer smell from their floor drain so I'll take sour over that any day. Anyway, the solution recommended by the plumber is to pour a couple liters of water down that drain if it starts to get funky smelling, which worked for our situation but the problem at my parents' house needed a bit more work by the plumber to fix.

When a house is designed so that it's basically one or two large rooms (open floor plans!) any funky smell is going to be detectable throughout - keep the ceiling fan (if there is one) running on low, run the ac/heat, open every darn window in the place...whatever has to be done to air things out so that the house doesn't smell. If the toilets don't have water in the bowl, something that can happen when the home has been empty for a while and nobody is using the facilities - that can cause a weird funky smell too. The townhouse I owned back in SoCal was occupied at the time I went to see the place with the realtor, and our current home was also occupied during the (brief) time it was on the market - one of the neighboring townhouses was occupied by a heavy smoker, the people who bought it replaced pretty much everything except for the drywall, used special (supposedly) odor-blocking primer before they painted and it still smelled like stale cigarettes again every three months or so...Some smells are all but impossible to eliminate permanently. :P

Good suggestion to run water into all of the drains. We have several homes through the years that we have not used some of the bathrooms very often. My DH sets his calendar alert for the first of every month. He goes through out the house and pours a pitcher of water into every drain. This includes all basement drains, too. This takes care of the funky smell from your drain and sewer pipes.

Most people don't realize that there is a trap in every drain that holds water in order to prevent sewer gas from entering the structure. It evaporates.

As a former flight attendant, we put open packages of dry coffee grounds in the aircraft lavatories. Otherwise, they would become so stinky, you couldn't go inside them. Dry coffee grounds work. Don't try to use them for coffee afterwards. They do need to be changed frequently.

Experiment over: the house smelled like coffee, but I don't think was anything but a coverup odor. Oh well.....

Not certain but I think after using the grounds you need to air the house out or start decreasing the grounds. Thanks for trying it.

Thanks for the update! Our place the smell is less strong now that we live here, but the garage does smell old. I've cleaned all the drains and that helped.