Years ago a skunk took up residence under the breezway of a house I had to clean out and sell. I never actually saw the skunk, but there was no mistaking the precise identity of who was down under. The neighbors saw Mr. Stinky coming and going on a couple of occasions. I’m not sure what got him mad enough to spray the place, but that’s just what he did.
One sunny afternoon, when I was pretty sure the skunk was out from under the house, I blocked the hole he had used to establish residence. Then I headed off to the hardware store for some advice.
“Ammonia,” that’s what the white haired man behind the counter advised. The hardware store man told me to put wide bowls full of ammonia in several spots throughout the breezway. And so I did. And the man instructed me to do something counter-intuitive. I was to leave the windows and doors shut in the space so the ammonia could do its work. And so I did.
How it worked, I can’t tell you, and it took some time, weeks, I think, and many refills of those bowls. But ammonia did the trick and the skunk smell was totally eradicated.
Notice what the hardware man did not send me home with. I did not get scented plugins that poof away every so often. No aerosol spray cans of scented deodorizer or fragrance were dispatched. He did not give me caches of potpourri to scatter about.
If you believe what you see on television, well the answer to all odors is another odor to layer over it. I love the family scene where the fish from yesterday’s supper is floating about the room. Mom injects a little aerosol spray into the picture to fill the room with cascading lavender. So what you now have is lavender scented fish. Yuck!
There does seem to be an aversion to cleaning implicit in all these commercials.
Has the dog taken up residence on your sofa? Smelly gym shoes making the closet a little grim? Well don’t clean it, for goodness sake, just spray another smell in the offending direction.
I’ve got a house for sale that hasn’t been lived in for a couple years. I complained to the owner that the place smells musty and that it could use a good airing out and a fresh cleaning.
The other day I showed the house. Now the house smells musty with lemon and vanilla atop the must. In each room there was a little clear vase with scented liquid and a bunch of smooth sticks sticking out of the vase. I’m told the sticks carry the flavor of the liquid into the air.
The place needed a little elbow grease and some fresh air. What I got instead was scented sticks.
For bathroom showers there’s now a contraption that gives the shower an automatic shower after you step out from your own shower. It’s a gyrating cleanser spray that sends an arc of liquid cleanser automatically from the top of the shower. What it lacks, regrettably, is a good stiff brush and some bleach.
My friend Jerry bought a handy man house that had a kitchen and bathrooms that were dingy and stinky and he and I assumed that he would gut the rooms and replace everything. Jerry’s mother is from the old country and she had a different idea. Armed with various sized brushes and bleach and cleanser and big, bright yellow rubber gloves, she did her magic. Jerry cancelled his plans to remodel after a thorough old world cleaning yielded sparkling, fragrant neutral kitchen and baths that were classic and squeaky clean.
It leaves me wondering if anyone makes an ammonia scented plug-in? Or bleach flavored potpourri? Now that might get my attention!