11 Things Making Your House Smell OLD (Nobody Will Tell You)

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com Somebody worked something out about your house in the first four seconds they were in it, and they have not told you. They will not either. There is no way to raise it with a person that does not sound like an insult, so everyone who has noticed decided that saying nothing was kinder, and they were probably right. And the one person who cannot check is you. A nose stops reporting a smell it is sitting in within a few minutes, and that is not a weakness. It is how a nose is built. It is there to tell you when something changes, and a thing that never changes stops being news. My grandfather taught me this in the milk house when I was eleven. I had scrubbed it, and when he asked whether it smelled all right I said it smelled fine. Then he sent me out to stand in the yard for the length of time it takes to fill a bucket and made me walk back in. It smelled of the barn, and it had smelled of the barn the whole time I stood in it with a brush in my hand telling him it was fine. A nose tells you what has changed. Never what has always been there. The mechanism, and every one of the eleven is a version of it. A house does not make a smell. A house keeps one. Everything soft in a building takes up what is in the air and gives it back slowly for months. What you smell today is a few years of cooking and damp and dust that went into something soft and never came back out. And a plain house does not have this trouble, which is not because we are cleaner than you. Very little upholstery, no wall to wall carpet, not sealed tight, windows opened as a matter of course, wash on a line, and nobody has ever plugged a scent into a socket. Less in the house to hold it, and air that moves. That is the whole of the advantage, and any of you could have both. The eleven: The sofa, and the curtains in the same room that have never once been washed The carpet, and the foam underlay beneath it that no vacuum has ever touched The drain nobody runs, where the water seal against the sewer has quietly evaporated The washing machine door seal, the fold inside it, and the drawer housing behind The sponge, why boiling one does not save it, and the splash guard in the waste grinder Towels, the bath mat, and the warm airing cupboard they go back into Under the kitchen sink, where a slow weep swells a chipboard floor with nothing to see The refrigerator door seal, the drip channel, and the tray underneath nobody has looked in The bin itself rather than the bag The heating filter, and the duct cleaning you are about to be sold The vacuum, which blows it all back out warm if your house smells worse after cleaning Three of these have a whole video each already and are pointed at rather than repeated here: the mattress, airing the house properly in winter, and damp coming up through the structure, which is the one to watch if the smell is musty rather than stale, worse in one room, or back within a day of airing. Then the three ways to get an answer when you cannot use your own nose: go away and come back and use the first ten seconds; ask whoever will tell you the truth rather than whoever is kindest; or go at the reservoirs directly rather than the room. A smell that arrives suddenly wants investigating rather than airing. And two are not jobs at all: hot plastic or a fishy smell where there is no fish can be wiring getting hot, and gas means leave the house, touch no switch, and ring from outside. The plain limit, and it matters. This is almost never about a house being dirty. A spotless house with the windows shut, carpet wall to wall, heavy curtains and an old sofa will get it. A shabby one with bare boards and open windows will not. Not one thing on this list says anything about the person living there. Tell me in the comments which of the eleven you got up and checked while this was playing. I would wager it was the washing machine seal. And if you are new here, tell me how old your house is as well. Next time I want to take this into the bathroom on its own, where all of the same things are going on and all of it is happening faster. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #HouseSmell #CleaningTips #HomeTips #MustySmell #NoseBlind #WashingMachine #DrainTrap #Homesteading #OldWays #SelfReliance #HomeMaintenance #AirFreshener #Housekeeping #SmellOld