SKUNK!

Oh, the joys of owning a dog!!

The boys & I had a busy day Saturday (a separate post to come all about that) so after our long, busy day we came home to head to bed. I fed Bailey her dinner & then let her outside while I got the boys into their PJs and ready for bed. Just as I was taking Wyatt back to his room to lie down, I saw Bailey sitting by the back patio door, so I stopped quickly to let her in. When she came in I smelt something a little bit off, but I was right in the middle of trying to get the boys to bed so I didn’t pay much attention (I was trying to hurry because I was going out to dinner with a couple of friends from high school to chat & catch up after they were in bed). As Wyatt & I were lying down, back in the boys’ room, this awful smell just hit me. When I walked back out to the kitchen, Cory’s brother’s girlfriend (who was babysitting for me for that night) said she smelt it too. As I got into the kitchen, the smell hit me – it was really strong!! SKUNK!!

I whisked Bailey back outside (she seemed clueless as to what was going on) and called Cory (he was away hunting for the evening but I really needed his opinion).

But the bad news – the house still stunk! The smell had gotten inside & it was now stuck there. I lite as many candles as I could find and sprayed the living room with Febreeze. That didn’t help much. The boys & I all slept with our doors shut that night, which helped keep the smell out of the bedrooms a little bit but the kitchen & living room still smelled horrible. Early Sunday morning, after a sleepless night & a lingering headache (from either the awful odor or all the fragrances I used trying to cover it up), I decided to pack the boys & myself up and head to my parents for the day to escape our house & the smell. Before we left, I took a friend’s advice & Googl-ed a little bit more for possible solutions. The solution – vinegar.

The first suggestion was to boil the vinegar, so I had a water/vinegar mixture boiling & steaming the whole time we were packing up & getting ready to go. The next solution was to leave bowls of vinegar out to absorb the smell – so each room got a small bowl of vinegar in it. The final thing I did was shut off the heat, open all of our windows & turn on the fans. (We were lucky we had high temps in the upper-50s yesterday.)

My dad & I headed back to our house, while the boys were down for naps, to check out how the smell was coming along. We were both happily surprised when we stepped into the kitchen & didn’t smell a thing – the vinegar & air-ing out had worked! I threw out all the vinegar, turned off the fans, shut the windows and turned the heater back on. We had also changed the furnace filters (another suggestion I found online – which was good that I read because ours had the skunk smell it in) before turning the heat back on. Hooray!

What a headache to deal with – especially on a Sunday when our only plans were to hang out at home, catch up on laundry & some house cleaning. (I had even had nightmares that we weren’t going to get the smell out!) A BIG thank you to my parents for putting us up for the day – I know they didn’t have other plans but it’s nice to know they are there for us whenever we need them.

(I’m not saying vinegar is going to be the solution that will work for everyone, but it worked for us!)