*****WARNING This story is not for the faint of heart. It contains graphic pictures that are 100% real. No Photoshop. Be glad they aren't scratch and sniff.*****
The date was August 29, 2012. The day was almost over when we arrived home. The house had lain empty for 2 weeks now, of course I hadn't seen it in 7 months. I was happy to be home. We all were. It had been a long drive from Castle Rock, CO we all had fun, but we were tired and happy to sleep in our own beds for a change. You know the way your house smells when you've been gone a long time? It's literally the smell of home. Our house always smells like a new house to me when I come home after having been gone at school. I don't know why, it's not a new house. It's 4 years old. I'll be honest I was excited for that smell. We pulled in the driveway and after dad gave us a rundown of how the rest of the evening would go (unpack and put everything where it belongs before we can shower, eat, or go to bed) we attempted to get inside the house. Our front door was locked and there technically wasn't a key that could open it (a year ago our door knob broke and I installed the new lock and handle. I left the key business up to my dad, but of course the whole lock reset kit is in a box somewhere probably locked away in the room of requirement at Hogwarts where the rest of lost items end up) our garage door wouldn't open and that was a little bit curious. Figuring/hoping the old house key would work on the back door we went around and tried that out. We were in. I first realized something was wrong when the smell that reached my nostrils wasn't the smell of new house. In fact when I watch Hoarders I imagine the smell I smelled at that moment.
It was
awful.
My mom who claims to have the best sniffer in the family thought it smelled like rotten garbage. The garbage had been taken out before the big trip though so that wasn't it. Dad tried to flip the lights on. No go. All at once the realization of what had happened hit us. The power was out. There was no telling how long it'd been out, but by the smell of the house. It was longer than a few days. It had to have been close to 90 degrees in the house. It was muggy, hot and the smell. Oh goodness the smell. There was a fridge in the kitchen and a fridge in the garage...right next to our deep freeze. We dreaded the task, but we knew what had to be done. The fridge inside had to be cleaned out. It took several kitchen sized garbage bags to contain the bacteria infested and vomit inducing rotten food within the fridge/freezer side by side. Meat was crawling with maggots, juices leaked all over our hands, shoes, and the tile. The milk had turned thicker than cottage cheese and had turned a sickly green/yellow color. Butter had melted and once more solidified on the shelves of the door. Cheese looked as though it had been in the sun for hours. A can of crescent rolls had burst open and risen to the size of a pizza crust, and oh the stink. Imagine an animal crawling into a dumpster in an alley that holds the waste of a sushi bar, the grease from a fast food restaurant, and the dirty diapers of a day care. The animal dies in the dumpster and sits there rotting. The trash from the dumpster is then taken to a dump in Texas out in the open with no shade coverage in the middle of the summer. The smell that rises from that stinky pile of filth was maybe 1/3 of the stench coming from our indoor fridge. The deep freeze was twice as bad as that. I apologize for the colorful description, but it is necessary. The smell was so bad that one sniff would send you dry heaving. Heaven forbid you breathe through your mouth. You could taste the smell. That's how bad it was. Like taking a bite of that aforementioned trash. I have to give credit to my mom and Mckelle though. They are definitely tougher than the rest of the family. I can't deal with bad smells. They drive me crazy. I could touch my uvula with a toothbrush all day and not gag once, but if a smell worse than mild fart reaches me I'm retching like a victim of E. coli.
This is the inside of our deep freeze. It doesn't look too bad, but again, be thankful you can't smell it.
These are all of the juices that remained after we cleaned out everything. This contains meat juice, melted ice cream, Turkey drippings (and NOT the good kind) and pretty much the gross things that drip off of all the items above when they rot in a deep freeze with no electricity.
Top: The garage upright freezer. Ruined freezer jam, bread, pizza, berries, bread and some pie crust (?)
Bottom: The outside fridge. Check out that gnarly cheese. The orange juice was foul. Yogurt was solidified...hot dogs looked pretty alright...scary...
Below the bottom: The butter that melted. The blue line is about how high the butter had risen in it's melted state and then solidified again.
We had masks on, those did little to nothing even when we doused them with lavender. That smell penetrated walls, garage doors, everything. You could smell it throughout the house, but it was definitely worse when you got up close to the source.
The cleaning crew!
So come to find out there was a lightning storm THE DAY MY PARENTS LEFT!! For 2 weeks that food sat there rotting. Apparently lightning hit the street in front of the house and the neighbors had some minor mishaps, we were lucky and got the full force. It blew the fuse box outside and fried anything plugged into the internet, our AC, some of the circuits were all messed up so an electrician had to come cut up our walls to find the source of the circuit issues. Here's the hole he cut in my dad's office wall, it's about the same height as the wall. It's really a huge miracle that our house didn't burn down. All of the black is charred from the electric surge.
Our insurance covered some of the damage and we're grateful for that, but after seeing this wall we were even more blessed that our whole house wasn't a pile of ashes when we got back. On the plus side we got a new fridge and boy is she a beaut! Freezes stuff in the fridge, but that's alright sometimes.
SO that was our week from Hell. The AC was out upstairs for over a week, and boy was it stinking HOT. I love Texas more than any of the other 50 states, but dang it's hot. Everything is pretty much back to normal now, we haven't replaced the fridge/deep freeze in the garage yet, so we're tight on refrigeration space, but that's definitely a first world problem and I shan't complain about that.
The moral of this story is, if the people who are keeping an eye on things while you are gone can't get in through the garage with the code, tell them to break a window and remove all the food in your fridge and deep freeze. ;)
Bree
