I can't smell my own house anymore. I know this because last summer my sister Kayla walked into our kitchen, set her bag on a chair and said, "Oh, hi, lake dog," in the tone you'd use to mention the weather. Hank wasn't in the room. He was out back. That's how I knew.
Kayla is driving down from St. Cloud on Friday to stay the night before we all go to the State Fair on Saturday. So yesterday was clean-up day, and this time I went after the smell on purpose instead of tidying around it.
Where the smell actually lives
The trick for nose blindness, I've found, is to leave for an hour, come back in through the front door and stop just inside it. When I did that on Sunday, here's where the smell was coming from:
- Hank's bed in the living room. The cover zips off. The foam underneath was the bigger problem.
- The life jacket. It had been drying on a mudroom hook between swims all month, never quite dry, smelling exactly like the bottom of a lake.
- The plaster by the back door. Hank sleeps there every night, leaning on the wall, and there's a faint gray-brown shoulder mark at dog height on the old paint.
- The sofa throw and the washable rug. Both get washed often, and both were due anyway.
- The window units. More on those below.
The list we worked through
- Wash the bed cover, the sofa throw, the rug cover and every towel in the mudroom, in fragrance-free detergent with an extra rinse.
- Vacuum the foam bed insert, sprinkle it with baking soda, leave it in the sun on the back steps for the afternoon and vacuum it again.
- Hose the life jacket inside and out and hang it on the fence to dry in full sun. It lives in the garage now.
- Wipe the plaster at dog height with warm water and a few drops of dish soap on a wrung-out cloth. Old plaster with seventy-some years of paint on it doesn't want to be soaked, so it's a gentle wipe, not a scrub.
- Give Hank a real bath on Thursday, his last swim day before company, and make sure he's dry to the skin. A damp undercoat is half the smell.
- Scoop, empty and wash Mabel's box, then refill it with the same unscented clay.
- Run the robot vacuum, then go after the corners and the sofa with the upholstery tool.
- Open the windows on a cool morning and let the upstairs box fan pull fresh air through for a couple of hours.
Things we don't use: plug-in air fresheners, essential-oil diffusers and scented candles. Our vet steered us away from those around a cat years ago, and anyway, they just put a smell on top of a smell. What's fine in the air around your own cat is a quick question for your own vet.
The fix that worked best
The window unit filters. I'm a little embarrassed about this one.
Each of our three units has a mesh filter behind the front grille that slides out. The living room one, the unit that runs all day right next to Hank's bed, hadn't come out since June. When I pulled it, it wasn't gray. It was golden. A full mat of Hank's undercoat, thick enough to peel off in one piece like felt, with dust packed underneath. That unit had been pulling living room air through a dog-hair sweater and blowing it back at us all summer.
I unplugged each unit, slid the filters out, rinsed them in the laundry tub with warm water until it ran clear and let them dry on a towel before they went back in. The upstairs and office units were less bad, but not by much. By evening the living room smelled like nothing in particular, which is the smell I'm after. The unit seemed to cool better, too. Caleb walked in, stopped, sniffed and said "Huh," which is about as close to a review as he gets.
The manual, which I found in a kitchen drawer afterward, says to clean the filter every two weeks during heavy use. We now have a reminder on the calendar for every other Sunday. Other units will have their own instructions, and unplugging first is the one step I'd never skip.
Hank, for the record, has been told there's no swimming between Thursday's bath and Kayla's visit. He took the news about as well as you'd expect from a dog who heard the life jacket buckles from the garage this morning and has been sitting by the back door ever since.
