The Smell of Success

Well, we are back from vacation. Safe and alive, albeit exhausted and less sane than when we left. More on that later.

Hypothetical situation.

IF you ever decide that buying a new house, moving out of your old one and packing for/planning a 2 week vacation in 3 days is a good idea, and IF your plane tickets get screwed up last minute and you and your insane family decide to rent a couple cars and make a cross-country drive in 40 eye-blearing, mind-numbing non-stop hours is a good idea and IF you decide that in the midst of packing for the move you will just wait and pack for the vacation after you have moved all your crap over and cannot find ANYTHING and thus have to resort to packing in a frenzied mad-dash sort of sitation is a good idea.....

For the love of all that is good and gracious in this world, make sure your freezer door is closed tight and the 10 pounds of hamburger you have stored in there do not defrost, leak and rot all over your new-house kitchen for 2 weeks in 100+ degree heat with no AC turned on.

OHHHH YA. We exhaustedly made it back to our humble abode around midnight on Saturday to the smell of ROTTING DEATH. Seriously, folks. There are no words to describe the smell of it. We gagged our way into the kitchen to find pools of rotted hamburger and blood all over the kitchen floor, the freezer looking like somebody had been shot, blood and gore drippings all over the shelves....I cannot even begin to describe the horror. It has been hours and hours of scrubbing and bleach-baths and still we aren't finished. 10 lbs is a LOT of rotted hamburger. (I won't go into detail about the use of the steam cleaner except to say this: if you thought rotted raw hamburger smelled bad, try smelling it after it has been cooked with a blast of steam.)

The smell had permeated the entire house. The blood pool had gone clear under the freezer in big gloppy dried-up messes, the water tray was filled, the bottom of the freezer was filled, and it was all rotted.

So, 2 days and $50 worth of Febreeze and Air-fresheners later, we are starting to get the smell out. I say starting to because it is not near the gagging death trap it was earlier, but you can still smell it when you walk in. It was in all of our bedsheets, the carpet...everything. We have air fresheners plugged into almost every outlet, little fans that blow air-fresheny goodness throughout the room, I am Febreezing EVERYTHING that is Febreezable, and we have super heavy-duty Arm and Hammer carpet deodorizer for when we get all the boxes moved and can actually SEE the carpet.

It has been a disaster of epic proportions. Who knew being a home owner was so much fun??

In other news, I have lots of pictures and stories from the South Carolina trip. However, this is my first week back on graveyard shift so I have countless hours ahead to blog it all away. So stay tuned.