It may dissipate by the time your guests arrive this week. Let's hope so.

Going to try the vinegar. Someone suggested a mix of baking soda and fabric softener.

If it’s a dead thing, shouldnt it be frozen? Have you checked underneath everything?

Do you heat with gas? If yes do the pipes enter your home in that area. Sometimes the stuff that gas companies add can mix with other smells in a house. If it is the same area you might want to call your gas company for them to check. Do the vinegar for now. The hardware stores here sell bags of powdered charcoal normally in the cleaning area for odor absorption.

I'll be praying for the vinegar and the baking soda and any other home remedies to work... I have no other suggestions. I feel for you. On a positive note, it is supposed to warm up some so hopefully if it s still smelly, you can open the windows..... sniff sniff.

Please tell me the odor is not coming from the area around your stove. A friend of mine had the same problem and the dead mouse was in the insulation to the oven. She had to buy a new stove, of course.

Im guessing its under a cabinet where i cant get to it so it won;t freeze. Thankfully the gas pipes come in on the other side of the house and its not near the oven.

Imstarted cleaning out a caninet near the smell. It has my cookbooks i it, most of which have not been opened in ages. So now on top of hunting for a dead mouse, I am weediing out my cookbooks! No,point in putting them back when i dont use them. What a away to spend Christmas evening. :)

It's been years since I had to deal with a dead mouse, but I remember the smell. Yuck. Have you ever forgotten a partial bag of potatoes that rotted? Almost as bad as a dead mouse! Sorry you're dealing with this and hope it dissipates quickly.

While you are looking for the departed rodent, also look for small holes in the cabinets. If there is one that was able to gain entry to your kitchen area, its friends and acquaintances with be moving in soon.

Lucille, i hooe yo’re wrong but afraid you’re right. Theyseem to bring their families along.

3Katz, thank you. I’ll look for that. Too bad i don’t have three cats!

Dedtired - if you can find the mouse corpse and get it out of your house, simmer water mixed with white vinegar and pickling spices for a long time. That worked for us to eradicate a major skunk spray under our open windows one summer. I used a crockpot with the lid off for about 24 hours...

I ended up getting professional pest people to come out and figure out where they were getting in. I knew they were in my attic but couldn't tell how they were getting in there. I put some poison in the attic and then of course they crawled into the laundry room wall and died - gross. Turns out they were kind of burrowing under the landscape rock and then through an opening under the bottom of the faux rock on the side of the house. The pros stuck some steel wool in there which worked for that year but then they were back. I ended up getting that copper mouse mesh and poking around the bottom of the faux rock and shoving a lot of that stuff in there until I could shove no more. They haven't been back.

Wow, you must have been REALLY naughty this year!

Amylou, I wish.

^^^ LOL!

Unfortunately we had the same problem just last week. Our 200+ year old house has many nooks and crannies in the basement. i could smell it and knew where the odor was coming from, but couldn’t get to it. We called the pest control service we use and he couldn’t find it either but did suggest using ground coffee to eliminate the awful stink. He went on to say drug dealers hide drugs in ground coffee and even the drug sniffing dogs can’t detect it. We put the coffee in a small bowl in the opening immediately and the odor subsided, 3 days later it is totally gone. We had some old grounds and just ground them up again to release the scent. Hope this helps you! ! Good Luck.

Cran

Ded, have you pulled out the bottom drawer of the area where you smell the odor? In my kitchen, if I pull out the bottom drawers, it is open to the floor. This only works were there are drawers.

Bless your heart. I feel for you. The first house XH and I bought was built in 1875. All sorts of things could get in through the gaps in that house!

No drawers, just cabinets. They are corner cabinets that are filled with stuff i havent used in ages. Thats part of the problem. i can’t empty out those cabs and then put the unused junk back.in. I need to get rid of unused stuff but with visitors coming, i can’t have a mess of stuff in the kitchen! Then i have to figure out how to get rid of things. Talk about give a mouse a cookie …. literally.

I ordered some Smelleze and stuck an old bag of coffee in there. Hope they make a difference.

So sorry. No good solutions except to find the carcass as soon as possible and eliminate it if you can.

But your plight reminded me of this oldie...maybe help bring a smile to your face....

that's the worst smell EVER and it seems to linger for a very long time!! if you have a small crock pot, fill it half full with water and add some whole cloves, cinnamon sticks (or ground, if that's all you have), orange peels, some allspice or whatever other "fall" spices you may have on hand. let it simmer all day and it does a decent job of covering up the stink. this can also be done in a pan on the stove, just don't forget it's there so it doesn't boil dry!!

I used peppermint oil a few years back for the smell.

Ha ha, Annie, i do remember that song. One time i ran over a dead skunk, it went between the tires and my car stunk for days.

Nina, great idea.

At least i have somr good newds, sort of. My guests due to arrive Thursday both have Covid so they cancelled. Thats a relief.

Ded, unload the stuff. Hide it in your car trunk until your guests leave!

Ha ha, bbstx. Ive been known to hide stuff in the dishwasher. Thankfully, never turned it on with mystery items inside.

( on another note, i think I hold the record here for most typos)

Our first Christmas in this house, we were hosting over 20 people for Christmas Eve. In early December we noticed an odor coming from the front hall, traced it to the closet, and most likely between the walls. It got worse and worse! We stuffed Lysol-sprayed socks in the gaps around the sliding door tracks and changed them daily, and the odor dissapated enough by Christmas Eve that the cooking and baking and Christmas tree and candles overpowered what was left. If anyone ever remodels the closet, i suppose they’ll find a wee carcass stuck between the studs.

I'll just add another possibility. A few houses ago, I noticed a dead mouse smell coming from the outside corner of our dining room. It was an 100 year old house. We were sure it was a dead mouse in the outside wall. Then my dh noticed a very faint brown mark on the outlet cover near that corner. He removed the cover and saw that the outlet had shorted out and the wires were melted. It definitely had a dead mouse smell to it. Just double check any outlets or switches in the area. Better to be safe than sorry!

Ded, my worst ”hide it” trick was when I stuck some candlesticks, complete with candles in the oven. You know what is coming….I forgot and turned the oven on to preheat. The pervasive smell of melting wax reminded me. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Sorry/not sorry the guests have Covid. A lot of our Christmas get-togethers this year were smaller due to people being sick, and not just from Covid. Hope the mouse problem dissipates soon!

Omg, i was out for the afternoon, even left the window cracked slightly, and the smell is so bad itmakes my eyes water.

Ill check the outlets. At least that can be fixed quickly, especially if the house burns down. Actually Actually, that would solve the problem either way.

Could it be something larger than a mouse, perhaps a snake or squirrel, that might have gotten in through a window or door left slightly open?

Goodness. So sorry you are going through this!

A friend of mine manages a large executive resort vacation house that had dead mice somewhere in there. I helped her look for them. It was such an amazingly awful smell. You have my sincere sympathies. She never did find them and eventually the stink went away on its own, but rental guests had to be cancelled. The smell was gag-inducing.

We had a rodent stuck in a closet for some time here. Couldn't catch the varmint, but he eventually snuck out and died under the bed. That smell was terrible too, but the multi-rodent death smell in the luxury home was 1000x worse. I used a bag of charcoal under the bed as scrubbing and vacuuming didn't do the trick. That worked in a few days. I bought it on the A store, but maybe hardware stores have some on the shelf. I hope you find it so you can recover. Doubly bad this happened on Christmas. :-(

Good luck with this Ded, it can be quite vexing..

Thanks. I think I’ll wear a clothes pin on my nose.

I have purchased two houses with the dead animal smell. One turned out to be a raccoon that dug under the shed and died. It was rainy and the water kept it fresh and wet! The other one....the house belonged to a traveling nurse, she hadn't lived in the house for 5 years. She'd had a dishwasher installed in her absence. The P-trap was NOT capped off. The counter top covered it. We ripped out the kitchen to remodel it and found the problem. Put water down the P-trap, put a $2 metal cover over it....no smell.

We once had a mouse die in our wall. We crawled above the wall with several vacuum hoses duck-taped together...and sucked him out.

ded...don't know if any of these apply to you...?

I’m pretty sure there’sa dead something somewhere. When the forced air heat comes on, it gets worse. It stinks in here this morning

Oh dear, so still not resolved? We had that dead animal smell one time, it was awful. I could smell it when anyplace near the stairway to our unfinished basement, and that ran under a closet that was shelving in our bedroom....linens, shoes etc. My normally helpful DH fled to his fathers where he made himself still very helpful but on the farm, he'd rather have been cleaning the barn than looking further for something dead.

I'd called the exterminator. I was helping him in the basement, we were pulling down the overhead insulation. That home had a half basement, half crawlspace under it. What we found:

a very dead rat and an arm load of those little packets of rat poison. Someone in the neighborhood had been putting out rodent bait, the animal had squeaked its way in to our basement ceiling from the crawlspace side where it had been stashing its little treasure of poison packets and died. Problem solved with some open windows and fans. And I did take further steps to make sure any tiny spaces between the two halves under the house were sealed tight.

Another reason people - to not use poison baits. Not only can they be detrimental to our pets or wildlife like the raptors, they could cause a major inconvenience for neighbor that you may never know about.

I'm so sorry ded...once you've smelled that smell, there is no forgetting it. I hope you get it figured out soon.

Aww ded, I was hoping things had improved. It is so puzzling.

I have a pretty sensitive sense of smell so I cannot imagine what you are dealing with.

(and yeah, sorry your company has covid but at least that is not adding to the experience)

It sounds like it is not always so strong, or it's not all over so I guess be thankful for that.

I'm going to hope it's soon resolved.

On the upside, I’ve been forced to clean out cabinets. Anyone want some vintage Tupperware? I sprayed Lysol into ine air duct and it helped some. This too shall pass.

Wishing you the best and fastest outcome - ugh!

This made me recall when a rat perished somewhere inside the walls of the main office at work - in the summer. The walls are just gypsum board and so the horrific smell permeated the whole area. The poor unfortunate office staff had to soldier through for more than a week, IIRC. My room is at the other end of the building, thank goodness!

We had a rat die inside one of our walls, but ours are concrete block and plaster and no smell can get through that apparently, but I still remember the sound of scrabbling that went on for a few days, growing steadily weaker...

OMG, carolb, I’d have to move out. Maybe permanently.

Ded, have you had your furnace checked? I have read that the odor that is added to gas so people can detect a leak can smell like a dead mouse. When you said it is even stronger when the forced air kicks on it made me wonder.

Any improvement? It's a shame that we're having a winter cold spell so you can't even open the windows - at least not for very long.

Ded, Lizabeth is right. It sounds like you have a gas leak. From one of the many articles online,

Heater smells like rotten eggs

If you have a gas furnace and notice a rotten egg or sulfuric smell, you may have a natural gas leak. Natural gas is odorless, so in order to make it detectable, a chemical called mercaptan is added. This chemical is responsible for that unpleasant smell.

We have bats that find their way in as well as mice. We finally called the bat man and he said he could 100% guarantee the bats never coming back. The mice he said they could never keep out 100% for all time. They can sneak into any crack or crevasse the size of a #2pencil. We have a wall in our walk out basement that they seem to get into. We can hear them scratching a day or so before they are quiet and the smell begins. It will last about five days then go. It's strongest at day 2-3. It does not get upstairs and really not overwhelming at it's worst. They don't seem to get anywhere else in the house from that wall. We envision the day someone will take that wall down and the pile of bones they will find!!! We are pretty diligent about checking our foundation outside and where the siding meets the brick but as stated by the experts it's an unending war. Their coming and going is always most often at seasonal weather changes. Just as it's getting close to hibernation time and in the spring when they are up and looking for food. The mouse trap behind the dryer gets the most use. DH put a camera on it and somehow they are coming through the dryer. He must have found just the spot to plug because this fall we had none! The wall between the family room and pool table is another story!!

Yes, the furnace guy was here just two weeks ago for the annual checkup and all is well there. The odor seems to have diminished this morning.

There are so many ways a mouse could get in here that it would be impossible to plug them all. Hopefully this little event is over .

Arcy, our first Christmas here after the house was built, I was watching tv one night by myself when I saw something move on the Christmas tree. It was a mouse eating the popcorn garland. The last one I ever made. :)

One time I was fretting about possible carbon monoxide poisoning when an older neighbor man remarked, "There's so many holes in your old house, I don't think you have reason to worry". lol Of course I know the hidden dangers of CM poisoning but I thought it was funny....and probably true.

I've been thinking about you, especially now that we're having a few warm days. Has the odor gone yet?

Hi Maire Cate, thanks fot asking. The smell has finally dissapated. Sometimes I think I get a whiff, but not much. It was just awful,for awhile. I hope all the mice stay outside from now on.