06/29/2026
TW!! Bones… ‼️‼️‼️
Being a first time homeowner has proved to be nothing but eventful.
Over the last several weeks we have been working on general repairs and upgrades to our home but something was lingering… There was an odor in the home that we had just passed off for sometime.
At first we may have thought it was the HVAC. Maybe the vents had some build up over time. We had soon abandoned this thought because the smell was designated to the living room. So we then had an HVAC company that came out and told us that they could not anything in the home (that was a bust). We then called Carpet Tech to come out and help us investigate. Once the technician arrived he confirmed that we caught faint smells of something…. Rotten.
My husband and I grew more and more concerned as we started to deep dive into the issue. He went into the crawl space in 90-degree weather to confirm that it was not coming from there prior to the companies coming out. So this past weekend we decided to bite the bullet and cut a hole into our ceiling after we had discovered it was coming from the attic.
As we all stood in the living room (the owners of The Copper Rose Ranch - CR2 were gracious enough to help us with each and every task we have faced so far by the way) I stood in the area where the smell was most prominent and I specifically said “I smell it right here”.. my husband geared up in his long sleeve and trash bag and we cut the hole.
Our pungent unidentified smell had now been identified. There was a dead animal in our attic. From our discoveries it seems a raccoon had got trapped in the attic before we bought the home and had essentially baked in our attic. The smell in my best description was like leaving towels in the washer for a long long time. I had lived in an older country home growing up so I was familiar with the smell of dead animals that had gotten trapped under a home before but this was entirely different.
After replacing the sheet rock and insulation, bleaching and using an enzymatic cleaner where the little guy had passed the smell in our home improved so much.
Point of the story; always have trust in your husband’s gut feeling about repairs to your home AND the human sense of smell is compared to a blood hound in this scenario. We were lucky in pinpointing where to cut 🤓
