The Smell of Damp
9 Mar 2020 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWhen the basement flooded, we had to move a bunch of MIL's furniture into the boatshed, which looks like a detached garage and has electricity and heating, but a bare earth floor. The smell of the boatshed has suggested mildew or other microscopic fungus to me since first whiff, and even standing at the open door of it makes me feel like I can't breathe.
Nobody else could smell what I could smell, or rather, nobody else smelled anything really out of the ordinary. They say that it smells of dirt or bare earth and also of attic-or-basement-or-otherwise-damp-ish-spaces, but in a normal way, not a bad way and not of mold or mildew, and not remarkable in a way that would make them cough.
Nonetheless, there was nowhere else to put these things, so a bunch of the furniture went in the boatshed when the flood occurred last August.
Eventually we moved furniture from the boatshed into the bedroom on this side of the house because the boatshed isn't necessarily wintersafe from damp - the only room on this side of the house with a door actually - and it filled said room up. The stink came with it. They sat there with the window open and vinegar and baking soda tubs lying around for a week or so before the funeral at the end of October, since some cousins needed to sleep in there on a spare mattress. The smell lessened but did not dissipate. (And since then we've been using the bedroom as a storage room and sleeping in the livingroom.)
It's been months, but most of the time the door is shut both because 1. there are valuable things in there that we don't want the cats on, and because 2. if the door is open, I still have to hold my breath when I walk by.
Yesterday we took advantage of our momentum to sort through more boxes of MIL's stuff - three that were on the desk, two big bins of of kitchen implements and gadgets, and then all the contents of the built-in closets in the bedroom. (We packed three more big boxes of stuff to donate to the Red Cross, trashed or recycled some other stuff, kept a small amount of linens and things, and photographed assorted sets of glassware to sell on the Finnish verson of Craigslist.)
After hours of going in and out of the bedroom frequently to carry armfuls of boxes/bags into the livingroom for our sorting business, I have a sore throat. It isn't swelled closed, so not a severe allergy, but it's definitely sore still, and it already was last night, actually. I was already sure that it wasn't my imagination of course, but this is further evidence that it's probably a sensitivity.
Nobody else could smell what I could smell, or rather, nobody else smelled anything really out of the ordinary. They say that it smells of dirt or bare earth and also of attic-or-basement-or-otherwise-damp-ish-spaces, but in a normal way, not a bad way and not of mold or mildew, and not remarkable in a way that would make them cough.
Nonetheless, there was nowhere else to put these things, so a bunch of the furniture went in the boatshed when the flood occurred last August.
Eventually we moved furniture from the boatshed into the bedroom on this side of the house because the boatshed isn't necessarily wintersafe from damp - the only room on this side of the house with a door actually - and it filled said room up. The stink came with it. They sat there with the window open and vinegar and baking soda tubs lying around for a week or so before the funeral at the end of October, since some cousins needed to sleep in there on a spare mattress. The smell lessened but did not dissipate. (And since then we've been using the bedroom as a storage room and sleeping in the livingroom.)
It's been months, but most of the time the door is shut both because 1. there are valuable things in there that we don't want the cats on, and because 2. if the door is open, I still have to hold my breath when I walk by.
Yesterday we took advantage of our momentum to sort through more boxes of MIL's stuff - three that were on the desk, two big bins of of kitchen implements and gadgets, and then all the contents of the built-in closets in the bedroom. (We packed three more big boxes of stuff to donate to the Red Cross, trashed or recycled some other stuff, kept a small amount of linens and things, and photographed assorted sets of glassware to sell on the Finnish verson of Craigslist.)
After hours of going in and out of the bedroom frequently to carry armfuls of boxes/bags into the livingroom for our sorting business, I have a sore throat. It isn't swelled closed, so not a severe allergy, but it's definitely sore still, and it already was last night, actually. I was already sure that it wasn't my imagination of course, but this is further evidence that it's probably a sensitivity.
