and, also, about that stench.

there's a set of french doors across from my bed, behind which is a water closet with the the hot water heater, gas lines and piping going directly into the floor. that area definitely smelled bad, but it came and went, so i decided it probably wasn't a gas leak. last week, i decided to try and seal the doors a bit better to see if i could block the smell a bit to better understand what it actually was.

i ended up with two conclusions from this. the first is that there's actually two smells, and they were getting mixed up into one. the first is a garlic-y or onion-y smell that appears to be coming directly from upstairs, and is either food or meth. i learned enough about meth in the last house (and was never convinced she wasn't smoking it) to understand that, and he does appear to have a drug addiction, but i can't rule out food, and in context think it's rather more likely. the other smell seems to be of something rotting and is likely bacteria in the piping coming directly underneath me. and, i am convinced that there are in fact pipes from the shower to the water closet that go underneath the floor.

it always seemed like the smell was coming from below me rather than above me, and, so, i think i've got my primary problem: there's very stinky bacteria in the pipes. and, this is sort of consistent with the stinky sinks, which i think i've mostly fixed via bleach.

so, i ran some liquid bleach through the bathtub and we'll see if it works or not.

as for the onion-y smell, now that i can separate it better, i'm going to try and figure out when it's coming. if i notice that it frequently smells like onions around five or six at night, i guess that's just a diet choice and something i'll need to get used to. but, if it starts coming down at odd hours, i might have solved more than one problem....

i'm going to say this again: it always seemed like the smell was below me, even when it was clearly smoke. so, was i smelling the gaseous byproduct from the bacteria and deciding it was smoke? i'll have to keep at this with the bleach for a while and see how effective it is in the long run, but, for now, it seems to have cleared it up.

and, i actually think i'm going to take a nap.