The Story of Why Our Basement Smells

Everytime guests come over I get embarrassed about taking them downstairs. It smells. My mom always reassures me that it's an unfinished basement in a really old house so that's just how it is, but I always buy several air fresheners each time I go to Walmart to put down there anyways. It's not that bad with something smelly good canceling out the weird musty smell.

Well, Scott and I decided we're going to re-floor by putting down some pretty wood-looking laminate over the scraped up/nasty/orange wood on the floor upstairs and finish the downstairs (and cover all the cement). Upstairs? We haven't done it yet, but we're not anticipating any huge problems. Downstairs? That's a whole different ball game.

You see, we have an old drain down there in the middle of the hallway on the floor. It's all rusted over and nasty looking.

So I thought, let's clean up this old nasty drain. Drain-O, right? That cleans drains! Let's pour some Drain-O down there and maybe that'll help. And then I had this nightmare about what came back out of the drain after we poured the Drain-O in. It was very Mummy-esque. Remember the flesh-eating bugs that came out of those little hill things? Yeah, that's what I dreamed about. Spiders and all other sorts of nasty bugs coming out of the drain.

 Fortunately, it was just a dream. However, it did dampen my desire to pour any thing down there.

I thought that we could just cover the drain up when we re-floor it downstairs. Scott thought that might be a bad idea though (which is totally valid). Call a plumber? No, waaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive. So when my parents came up, I asked my dad. He pretty much knows everything. He said that there should be a trap or something that before the sewer. We should be able to cover it up if we sealed it properly. This is what it would look like ideally (from what I understand):

When Scott and Dad went down to look at it though, this is what they found:

Ummmmmmmmmmmmm, no wonder it smells down there a little. Not that it ever really smelled like sewer. It just smelled funny.

Gross.

So apparently that was a problem. And we had the hot water pipe leaking which added to the smelling problem. So Dad opened the valve all the way and voila! It quit leaking.

The Mad Haderlies, fixing one problem at a time.

But we've defintiely decided we're covering up the drain or something. I know it's for emergencies, but the drain isn't even near the washer, dryer, or hot water tank or anything. It's really oddly placed.

Hurray for fixing up old houses!

By the way things are looking currently, we'll be here longer than originally planned. According to our dream plan when we got married, we would be moving out next May. However, with my new job and Scott planning on going to Pocotello to get his masters, looks like we'll be here another few years. Sigh.