My basement is segmented off into five chambers: the movie room, an office, a closet, the furnace room, and the sump pump room. Every great once in a while I'd get a faint urine smell down there, and would immediately scold my teenager for not doing a good job cleaning the cat box. Fast forward to earlier this week, we came home from being gone for 3-4 days and the basement had a STRONG smell of urine. Once again, I kicked the teenager in the ass and she emptied the cat box. Thing was, neither the cat box nor the furnace room in which it sits smelled at all! The urine smell was coming from somewhere else... So I did a perimeter check of the basement on my hands and knees, feeling and smelling for wet spots. Maybe the cat had started scenting? Nothing. It was at that moment that I put the puzzle together: 1) The previous owners had gotten mice in the sump pump room a few years ago. 2) The mice were gone, but as mice do they had pissed all over the concrete floor. 3) We've just had a record amount of rainfall. And while the basement has been bone dry, the sump pump has been working overtime, introducing a decent amount of humidity into that space... Cliff Notes: During heavy rain periods, the sump creates a lot of moisture in that room, coming into contact with the dried mouse urine, causing it to "activate" and stink up my basement. Bleach + brush + shop vac = smell's gone!
Mice and bats are horrible for the urine smells. That smell gets in and is next to impossible to get out. I've had to replace whole floors right down to the floor joists before. Concrete soaks it up like a sponge.
Fingers crossed. I'll give it a bleach soak again tomorrow. There are a few shelves in there too that I'll tear out if I have to. Smells great thus far.
The weird thing was that it would only smell 3-4 times a year, for less than a day, and always very faint. I have a very sensitive sense of smell, most probably wouldn't have noticed it. It wasn't until I put the humidity piece in that it made any sense. Anyway, I'm just glad the previous owner nipped the mouse problem as quickly as he did. Had he allowed them to infest other areas of the basement I would have had a major mess on my hands.
Yeah, three weeks on and I think I've got it whipped. For a while I had this irrational fear that we still had a mouse or two, but that didn't pan out thankfully. I put out traps, motion detection cameras, the whole bit. Nothing moving around down there but the cat.
