Smells

"Your house smells nice".

These were the first words that my friend's autistic son addressed to me, as he walked in through Wydemeet's back door.

Ahhh! Just one of the greatest compliments! Such a shame that its not usually the sort of thing people say when they visit other people's homes.

I think different smells can be as mood-changing as different kinds of music, and I am verging on the neurotic about smells in this house.  "Dead mouse" is one that makes me freak out the most. Even worse than my son's Sex Wax.

Our best cloakroom, that all our guests come through, has been smelling of dead mouse recently. What a way to greet them!  The smell just wouldnt go away so I went mad on eBay, bidding for 24 bottles of pot pourri reviver, and three packets of rose, autumn mist, and lavender pot pourri's.  I won them all - as you might have guessed.

So I'm going to make quite sure that any smell of dead mouse is drowned out by dried bits of flower in future.

Living where we do, a mouse invasion is a constant threat, and they like to come inside - between the inside and outside walls - when the temperatures are sub-zero.  An immediate assault with poison is highly efficacious (God I'm sounding like 'The Scaffold' now).  Apparently, having been poisoned, the wee mice go off somewhere to drink, and die by the water source and mummify in some strange way.  Normally under our cloakroom floor it would seem.

I was also becoming extremely nervous about the smell of mildew finding its way into the main body of the house from my private new bathroom.

I favour carpets in this back of beyond, to keep us all warm and cosy, which is fine until the overflow gets loose and starts leaking.   My bathroom has a roll top bath, a silver-grey deep carpet (top of the range remnant from Trago), a silver and blue chandelier and bright yellow blind.  It is featured on this website and is much admired. I think bathrooms should smell as lovely as they look.

So I cut away the mouldy bit of carpet and slipped an ice cream container under the offending pipe I found, only for the smell to get worse! After many, many days of this, shutting my door, persuading myself that I was making things up, I made myself have another search around for the offending source, and discovered that all this time the radiator has a leaky joint. Which also accounts for the fact that I am having to constantly prime the central heating.

And then I realised why the front cloakroom was smelling so horrid - a waste paper basket full of old McDonalds left-overs from the car, combined with a pile of horse rugs in the washroom next door!

So I have spent weeks worrying over something that could have been put right in minutes.  And now Ive got to think of what to do with the 23 bottles of pot pourri reviver I have left ...