I realize this is my second post in two days about smells, but it is totally unrelated, I swear.
I am in the UK, but I have been trying to explain this smell to my wife for days…
The bathroom in the place we are renting short-term has a really weird smell in it. It’s not a good smell, but it’s not a smell that makes me want to run out and never go back in. I would describe it as ‘sort of unpleasant.’ Like absolutely tolerable, but I wouldn’t want to hang around.
It doesn’t smell biological. It doesn’t smell like human or animal or mold. It doesn’t smell like some sort of cleaning or construction chemical either.
The closest I have come to be able to describe it is like the stale breath of a smoker, except without the burnt things part. Like everything else in old cigarette smell but that. Except that’s not really right either.
This place used to contain (I think) a printing press and then was turned into apartments, so maybe it’s something left over from that? I don’t know, but I wish I could explain it!
My house has a smell like that. I noticed it on the viewing when the previous occupants were still in, and I assumed that it was “their” smell and that it would go with them. Nope. Part and parcel of the house.
It’s probably coming from under the ground floor floorboards because I’ve never been down there. It would require tearing far too much up in order to get down there.
My other theory is that something has soaked into the floorboards and has mostly but not quite been cleaned out.
Anyway, it hasn’t killed me. I have rampant ADHD, but I’m pretty sure the two things are unrelated.