I went home for lunch last Monday, heated up some soup, and went back to work. I didn't notice anything strange. When I got home Monday night, I could smell something outside the mud room, but it wasn't until I went in the house that the smell almost knocked me over! I couldn't identify it at first, it was so strong. My eyes were watering, and my first thought was that I had left the burner on the stove when I heated up my soup! I realized that wasn't the problem, walked through the whole house, and narrowed it down to the front bedroom and living room that were the worst.
I started to get a sinking feeling...I bent down to smell a couple of the heater vents (more on those later) and gagged. I immediately closed the offending vents--three, all on one side of the house. I lit a candle, opened a few windows and turned on a couple fans (kitchen, bathrooms).
My cat kind of liked having the window open.
I texted my supervisor, "I'm 99.9% sure that a skunk died under my house!" That night I slept with the window open.
The next morning, I texted our maintenance specialist (Dave). He said, "uh oh!" and came right over. He walked in the one room I had sealed off (it was horrible) and confirmed that my house did indeed smell really, really bad. We walked around the rest of the house, out to the street, around the house. He thought maybe the skunk had sprayed under the house and then left. Nope. We opened up some of the siding on each side of the house to air it out and made a plan for Wednesday. He was going to crawl under the house and start cutting through the insulation blanket to see if the skunk was on top of the insulation or possibly in the heater duct.
The heater vents: the person who had lived in this house before me told me that when the two sides of this mobile home were put together, "married," the heater ducts on the west side of the house were never connected, so they were just dead. I knew this when I moved in, but I didn't fully understand what that could mean, until the skunk died! It died, it's muscles tensed into rigor mortis, and a few days later, those muscles relaxed. Its scent gland also relaxed, releasing all of that skunk scent under the house and into the heater vents, which brought it right up into the house. (The heater vents are now connected!) All of my clothes, including my work uniform, smelled like skunk, so I went to the store and work smelling. I bought a lot of Febreze candles and a can of spray. I got back in my car, and my car smelled because I had been in it.
I had to do some paperwork and go into town on Wednesday, so I did the paperwork as fast as I could then went to the house to help Dave. I had to go into the bedroom to get my coveralls so I could go under the house and help him find this skunk.
Opening up the skirting. We could see where the skunk had dug under the mudroom and accessed the rest of the underside of the house. The mudroom was added on later, and whoever built it did not add a concrete pad; they built it over dirt. When Dave put the skirting back up, he put it under the mudroom, up against the concrete pad so nothing else can dig under to access the house!
No one truly believed me that there was an actual dead skunk under my house, but Dave was willing to look, and he had a good idea of where to look. Pretty soon I hear, "I see a tail!" I told him he was awesome and ran for some garbage bags. I helped him bag up the skunk (I was probably just in the way), and then took out two more bags of contaminated insulation from under the house. After we stopped at the park dumpster, I took him out to Starbucks for coffee as a thank you.
Thursday I was off, but I spent a couple hours driving around Carson City looking for skunk neutralizing soap while Dave attached the heater ducts. Both of us forgot that we stuffed garbage inside the duct to stop more smell from coming up into the house, so we didn't remember until the next day why there was still no hot air coming up....by the time my husband came home from work Thursday night the smell was so much better! We still spent the weekend washing clothes and renting a carpet shampooer from Home Depot to try to get rid of the remaining smell. There are stiff whiffs here and there but the house is live-able again!
I'm thankful for co-workers willing to help out with such a crazy and not fun situation! He was so impressed that I was there under the house willing to help him out, but he was really doing me a huge favor by finding that skunk!
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