Every house has a smell and there’s not much a homeowner can do about it. You can cook garlic meatballs every day for a year and, sure, your house will smell like garlic for a few days afterward, but then it will fade and the house’s innate smell will come back. This house smell phenomenon is one of the weirder things about life on our planet. I think God has a thing about odors.
The weirdest part of this circumstance is that the inhabitants of a house can’t easily smell their own house’s smell. I have caught a whiff of my house’s smell, but only after a long vacation. We went on a two-week trip about a year after moving into our house in Florida – a house that had a distinct smell of cold, damp stone from Day 1 – and I came home and immediately felt like I had entered a cave in the pit of a limestone quarry. I realized that all of my efforts to roast, bake, spray and candle-scent the smell away, it was still there. To everyone except those of us who lived in the house.
When selling a house, some people go all batshit over the smell – spraying Fabreze and popping Glade Plug-Ins into every outlet, baking things heavy in butter and vanilla, and simmering cinnamon on the stove. That’s just wrong.