The whole house smells like bleach.
Which is better than it had smelled. . .about 3 weeks ago we started to get an off odor in the kitchen. For the longest time we couldn't localize it, and it slowly got worse and worse.
We pulled out every drawer and every cupboard. Cleaned and poked. Nowhere did anything smell worse than anywhere else. We pulled out the appliances and cleaned behind and found. . .nothing. And the smell got worse and worse and we just couldn't find it.
Then while reading online, Judith found something that referenced a new refrigerator that had started to smell like a "cheesy foot amplified by 11." Pulling the fridge back out and getting around behind it and sure enough. . .the rank smell was coming from the base of the unit where the air vents went into the coils and compressor. I'd feel bad for missing it the first several times we pulled out the fridge, but to be fair those vents are 6 feet below my nose.
The article she had found referenced a mold that had grown in the tray which catches the drippings from the self-defrost cycle of their freezer. A simple enough cleaning it said. So we dug into the fridge manuals and found. . .nothing. No drip tray, no reference to cleaning the tray. . .just a clear warning that the fridge had no owner-serviceable parts and it would void our warranty to crack the thing open.
OK. . .time for warranty repair man. Who did come on a Saturday. . .which was great except that it was 3 weeks after we first smelled the thing. He comes in, removes 6 screws (even I could have done that), pops open the back of the fridge and starts looking around. Then he puts his hand into the moving fan. . .nothing broken, but he had some swelling and just a little blood.
Unplugging the fridge and getting back into it and. . .we don't have any mold. We don't even have a drip tray to remove. What we have is a fixed drip tray attached to the sealed compression system. With something. . .a mouse. . .a vole. . .whatever it was. . .once a small mammal anyway. . .decomposing in that tray. It was long past recognition what with 3 weeks passing since we first noticed anything.
And. . .it's in a non-removable component to the fridge. No way to get it out. No way to get in to really clean it. The guy explains that this isn't covered by the warranty and off he goes. Nice enough guy with a smarting thumb, but he did leave before the fun stuff.
So. . .hot soapy water and a turkey baster and half an hour later and. . .it's still there. A lot of [*edited because even I thought it was too gross to post*] was removed, but the core of it remains, stuck to the bottom of a tray that I cannot reach. So. . .bleach. Lots of bleach. And tomorrow the baster again (well, a new one. . .wasteful, perhaps, but I couldn't keep the old one after [**]). And then more bleach, and we'll see how long it takes to dissolve the damn thing.
Lesson learned: "Fresh Air" scented bleach my ass.
This is my NEW fridge. The one I got such a good deal on and used my credit card points to buy. If we can't get rid of it. . . do you think we can sell this one on Craigslist?
BTW, the article I read referenced the possibility of rodents, but we have absolutely NO telltale signs of rodents (see this article). We had cleaned behind the fridge and I had specifically looked for those. Nothing. Our guess (and based on the timing) is that the animal in question came in during the really cold spell we had, the cat chased it (I hope the cat chased it), it found the warmest place it could hide, and then was beaned in the head and killed by the fan that injured the repair man. Because the thought of rodents in my house gives me the willies.
