You can curate your household, renovate its most valuable areas, slowly but surely adjust the space to fit your family and its lifestyle needs over years, but that doesn’t mean maintenance is a job that is ever complete. Just the mere act of living in a building will require you to implement touch-ups here and there, even if for the most part these fixes aren’t a weekly occurrence.
However, sometimes there can be frustrations that each household suffers with. For instance, perhaps your steep driveway needs special care in the winter to make sure the ice doesn’t cause any risk of harm. But some problems can apply to different households equally, chief of all among them the difficulty of addressing unpleasant smells.
All smells are caused by something, and now and then it’s nothing to worry about. But unidentified smells and not being know how to manage them can cause its own sense of frustration. In this post, then, we hope to help you subvert it:
Garbage Can & Dumpster Cleaning
Unfortunately, many of us are aware that smells can easily stick around even after the garbage truck has been and gone. This happens qutie often with outdoor bins, especially during warm weather when food waste starts to decompose faster and it’s just sat there. A good spray down with the garden hose can help, and a mix of vinegar and water works even better for smaller bins.
The main spots to focus on are usually the bottom of the bin where liquids collect and around the lid where bags might have leaked (this isn’t a pleasant part of this post, and we’re sorry). Keeping your bins in a shaded spot can make a difference too, since the sun tends to make those smells much stronger, and even putting up a structure can counter that. We’d also recommend garbage can cleaning service for larger bins, community bins or dumpsters, as it might have been years since they were attended to.
Damp & Pests
If you notice a strange funk, inside the house, often point to damp problems hiding somewhere. The space under your sink or behind the washing machine can get wet without anyone noticing and are the most common areas for issues. Sometimes you might catch a whiff of something musty, which usually means there’s a bit of mold starting to grow. Mice can cause funny smells too, especially if they’ve made themselves at home in your walls or under the floorboards. Getting some air moving through these spaces often helps, and checking your pipes for small leaks can help. From there, a dehumidifier might help in rooms that tend to get damp.
Local Farmer Activity
Living near farmland means dealing with certain smells from time to time, and most people accept that, but it can be quite intense if you’re not used to it. Farmers usually spread manure in specific seasons, and while it’s not the nicest smell, it usually clears up after a few days and signifies health of the local land. If you’re moving to a new area, you’ll find that closing windows during spreading times will help you maintain the interior environment. If you’re new to the area, chatting with neighbors about when these activities usually happen can help you plan ahead.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily address the annoying smells that can sometimes plague our homes, and identify if the issue needs to be rectified or not.
Daniel is a Cinnamon Hollow author passionate about house and home, renovations, homesteading and DIY.
