Why my kitchen smells better now

I love my husband. Because he takes care of the really icky stuff for me.

About two weeks ago, my kitchen started smelling. Really bad.

I've mopped. I've cleaned out narrow spaces between cabinets.

I've washed the wastecans.

I moved my stove/oven out and cleaned underneath it.

I vacuumed out the backside of my stove.

I cleaned out cabinets.

I've sprayed/sprinkled all of the following:

• bleach
• vinegar
• baking soda
• pet smell carpet powder (no idea why I have that...we never have animals inside, and we have very little carpet!)
• Lysol cleaner
• Lysol disinfectant spray
  

All to no avail.

There is an old small water heater in the corner of my kitchen, which has not been in use for many years. The smell was coming from that area.

I just knew a mouse had gotten in the house and died, and was consequently stinking.

These things happen - we live in the country. It usually doesn't take long for it to go away.

But this time, it had been two weeks!

Friday night, when I came home from a trip, I told my sweetie, "It's been two weeks, and it's not going away... we are gonna have to move the water heater."

So he started checking to see if it the water was disconnected. Check.

Is the power disconnected to it? He had to take off the front panel to check the wires, and

there was the source!

A squirrel had gotten into the water heater housing, and, since I guess I neglected to put any food in there... it died.
It decided to haunt us with it's nasty decomposing smell.

Good news: my dear husband took the nasty thing away, and my kitchen smells back to normal. Thank GOD! It was getting really bad.
And it didn't even look like it had started decomposing! It would have been months!

Bad News: a tiny little part of my mind had already started thinking about how nice it would be to get a real corner cabinet installed where that old water heater is... oh, well.