Old Homes Smell Funny

As some of you know, my wife, daughter and I moved back to Texas back in December. We still have a home on the market in Birmingham, so if you are looking to buy a house in Birmingham...

Anyway, we moved into this tiny little home right by the TCU campus that was built in 1929. It is in a perfect location for my morning commute to work, and for Alison, there is lots of great shopping nearby, and for Ava, lots of parks and fun kiddo stuff to do.

Our little tudor style cottage came complete with original window, those old heavy solid wood doors with the crystal door knobs, among many draft old house house sights, sounds, and smells. It smells like Granny's house. You know what I mean, right?

Along with fresh paint and new carpet in two rooms, there have been an assortment of smells wafting around our little old home. But one day a couple of weeks ago, Alison said, I think something may have died under the house. I thought, no, probably just a combination of paint, carpet and old drafty Granny's house smells that she must be catching a wiff of.

But finally, I opened my closet one day, opened an access panel to under the house and it hit me, the smell that can only be described as "DEATH." I called our fix-it guy and he came to have a look. I thought we had a mouse or a rabbit that may have gone under the house to die, but it was something else.

Yesterday, Alison called me and told me, you will never guess what it was that they pulled out from under the house. A cat. A great big swollen cat. The guy who pulled it out had a bad experience with it too. I won't tell you what happened, but it wasn't pretty. So things are pretty fun around our house, now that the cat is gone and we can get back to our life as normal in our little, old, drafty house.

A side note: On the way home from work yesterday, I saw a sign in our neighborhood with a white cat with orange spots with the word "MISSING" written across the top. I wonder...