Funky smell from next door

[Arch]

I have a neighbor who has all manner of disreputable-looking visitors all day and into the night. I used to wonder if he was running a cathouse in there, or maybe he was dealing.

I have finally determined that the funky odor that I thought was in the foundation of my house is actually coming from next door. It smells exactly like the diet canned cat food, made by Science Diet, that my vet told me to feed my chubby cat. The food doesn't really have a cat food odor, exactly. It smells deeply funky, like something that has been dead for a while and is finally at the end of the putrefaction stage. Hard to describe. Sort of liver-y, maybe.

Anyway, my neighbor has no cat. I wonder if he's cooking up something illegal in there, but I don't think this is what crystal meth smells like. Maybe he just has an old recipe for some favorite food, and lots of random friends.

Does my non-description of this odor ring a bell with anyone? I'm stumped.

[Fencesitter]

Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbours also complained about a rotten smell coming from his flat... But I think your neighbor's flat might rather be in the typical drug addict "I never throw out the garbage" state. I cleaned one such room together with two friends after an extasy/LSD/weed addict left it, you wouldn't believe what we found there. Slimy chicken carcass, three or four months old, for example, plus various other mouldy foods, and drugs, of course. And don't ask how much garbage we had to throw out or how that all smelled.

When you cook crystal meth, it causes funky chemical odors from the battery acid etc., not funky rotten meat odors, so your neighbour at least does not cook meth in his flat.

[April Dawne]

I'd have to agree, it almost sounds like something bad happened to someone over there, or the trash just never gets taken out and is rotting in a room(s). Maybe call the landlord and complain about the smell? Maybe they will investigate and figure out what's going on.

[Cindy]

You can always call the police from a pay phone, or yours, and say there is something suspicious going on, you can say that you wish to be anonymous. Better to be careful than blown up.

Cindy

[Fencesitter]

Maybe your neighbor's pretty decent. And if it's just a dead rat rotting in the wall and your neighbour just couldn't find out where the smell came from, masons will open the wall and take out the rat... WIN!

(We had this problem in the copy room of our office and it stank as awfully as in a serial killer's hiding place. The rat had been stuck between two layers of the wall for weeks.)

[spacial]

I can't wait for the next installment.

But Arch, be careful please.

[tekla]

If they were cooking meth the smell would be overwhelming.  They cook it in the Midwest a lot, using huge industrial level hog lots - the kind you can smell from miles and miles away - to cover the smell.  That's how bad and strong that smell is, and it's a very industrial smell, heavy on the acidic base.

That's what I get to know for living in a county in Iowa for over a decade that had more hogs than people.

[Arch]

Well, it's not really a rotten meat odor...it's more like...gah, diet cat food. I never suspected my neighbor was causing the odor until I started using this cat food and had to take the empty cans straight out to the recycling bin because they were stinking up my house. Then I wondered where I had smelled it before...

The smell is intermittent, and it always smells the same. I don't think he simply fails to take out the garbage. Maybe it's some kind of weird fertilizer in the garden. The next time I smell it, I'm going to track it down more carefully.

I don't know how long people stay. They're still around when I'm in bed. They park across his driveway; if they were blocking my driveway, I would call the cops and complain. Sometimes a guy will leave his car running in the street, but never for very long. And the house is rarely noisy. I'm grateful for that.

The neighbor is a real hippie-redneck type (seems like a weird combination) who takes great pride in his belching ability. He has the stereotypical truck and the stereotypical loose pants, complete with plumber's crack. He's nice enough; we are on friendly hi-bye-weather terms. But I don't know if he knows I am gay.

Well, we'll see how it plays out. I'll follow my nose, and I'll keep the public phone idea in mind.
Post Merge: August 07, 2010, 11:47:02 AM

If they were cooking meth the smell would be overwhelming. 

Yeah, I figured it couldn't be meth. I smelled it once before but don't actually remember it except that it stunk pervasively. Funny, it was in an upscale neighborhood. My ex and I were out for a walk; he commented on the odor and said he thought it was meth. He didn't call the cops, but the place was raided only a week or so later. I've never seen so many cop cars.

It would have been nice if they'd also hauled off the old Camaro in the driveway. It was on blocks and stayed there for months after.

[Fencesitter]

If you get along with your hippie-redneck neighbor, why don't you just ask him? Maybe he just has a little handicap.

Some people have a little disability so that they can hardly smell or even cannot smell at all. I have this problem, it was caused by an accident when I was 2 years old. I am very grateful when people tell me that my flat or I have funny smells as I cannot smell it myself, and I encourage people to tell me these things. It's really a sort of handicap as even if you are careful, you might miss out something smelly and you cannot know everything by heart about which things may smell and which not, and if the smell is lovely or awful, decent or strong. Even if you try your best and take good care, your flat might still end up stinking if you have this disability, or your shampoo might stink and you don't know it.

I probably wouldn't have smelled the rotting rat in the wall of my office, for example (this occurred before I worked there). I cannot smell the typical public toilet smells, and I cannot smell any flowers or farts. Exhaust emissions smell like a campfire for me but I can hardly smell them. I can hardly smell even the most extreme kinds of cheese, and if I can, they smell decent and lovely to me (Roquefort, Limburger, Esrom, goat cheese etc.). Burning rubber has a very decent musky smell which I like a lot and even turns me on, and terpentine smells good, lovely and fresh like a lemon plantage at the sea-shore. Both are my favourite odors, but I know they are bad for my health so I keep away from them. Perfume I either cannot smell at all or it has a putrid or chemical smell for me which really makes my stomach turn. You get the picture...

Maybe that's your neighbor's problem and he is not aware of the smell in his flat or thinks it smells lovely and decent. Many people don't tell this handicap to everyone to avoid questioning, pity or non-belief, and it is also a bit shameful to admit you might stink without knowing it.

[tekla]

It would have been nice if they'd also hauled off the old Camaro in the driveway. It was on blocks and stayed there for months after.

Come on, a neighborhood is not complete without a muscle car up on blocks.  In Iowa it didn't count till they had 3 or more motor vehicles up on blocks.  Gives the young'ens a place to play and all.

And I just meant that meth is very 'chemical' smelling, as opposed to 'organic' smelling, and even if you can't place the exact kind of chemicals, or level of organic rot, you know the difference at a sensory level.

[Arch]

Gives the young'ens a place to play and all.

Heh. I was just telling someone about visiting my relatives on the East Coast when I was eleven. My mother has always been terribly embarrassed about her origins, and I think she only visited this time because we were in the neighborhood and on the way somewhere else and would have been hard pressed to explain our avoidance. Anyway, my grandparents were doing this "meet the rest of the family" thing, and we wound up sort of in the backwoods, meeting dozens of cousins, second cousins, maybe third cousins. There were lots of grubby kids that my fastidious mother didn't want to go near, and the front lawn of one house had a rusted-out old truck, possibly a 1950s Ford, with some weeds growing out of it. Part of the playground, I gathered.

My mother was mortified, and I sorta felt sorry for her.