The air in a house

Twenty years of walking into other people's kitchens at seven in the morning taught me that houses have a smell, and that the people living in them stopped noticing it years ago.

Kept by Sophia Williams, North Carolina

Your house has a smell. You can't smell it, and that isn't a criticism of your housekeeping. It's just how a nose works. It quits reporting on anything that never changes, and about a week after you moved in, yours went quiet.

For twenty years I let myself into other people's houses at seven in the morning, and that gave me the one thing nobody thanks you for. I walked in cold, every time. I could tell in ten seconds whether a kitchen had fried something the night before, and whether water was getting in somewhere nobody had found yet.

Let me say the important part at the top instead of the bottom. None of what follows treats or prevents anything. It's housekeeping, most of it is free, and none of it is a substitute for asking a doctor about a symptom.

2.1

What a house holds

The air indoors is not the air outdoors

A room is a container. It holds whatever you put into it until something carries it out again, and most of our hours are spent inside one.

The biggest thing anybody puts in there is dinner.

Cooking is the busiest hour of the day for the air in a house. Frying most of all. Bacon on a Saturday, a pan of oil hot enough to haze. It goes up, then sideways, and by bedtime it has been through the whole downstairs.

Which brings me to the fan over your stove, honey. In half the kitchens I worked in, it had not been switched on in years. Some folks think it's only there for emergencies. Some think it's loud, and it is. Switch it on anyway, before you start rather than after, and leave it running five minutes after you're done.

If your fan vents outside, it's doing real work. If it only pushes air back into the room through a little filter, and plenty do, an open window is worth more. And the back burners sit closer to the vent, so if you're going to fry, fry on the back.

The other thing a house holds is everything soft in it. Carpet, curtains, the good chair nobody sits in, the bed. Dust settles into all of it and gets stirred up every time somebody walks through. Washing the bedding won't change a life. It's the difference between air you breathe once and air you breathe again and again.

And smoke of any kind stays. A wood stove with a poor draft, a fireplace on a still night, candles, cigarettes. I won't lecture anybody about smoking. My own daddy smoked most of his life and tried to quit more times than I can count, God bless him, and I loved him the whole way through. But the curtains in that house held onto it.

2.2

The first hour

Open a window wide, and not for long

Here's the trick I learned on those visits, and you only get one go at it a day. Step outside, stand in the yard a minute, then come back in. That's as close as you'll get to smelling your own house the way a stranger smells it.

Then open the windows.

Not cracked an inch all day. Wide, and briefly. If you can, open two at opposite ends of the house so the air has somewhere to go, and prop the doors between them. Five to ten minutes changes the air in the whole place.

People argue with me about this in January, and I understand why. But a window cracked an inch for six hours makes a cold draft down one wall and gets everybody turning the heat up. Open it wide for five minutes and the air swaps out while the walls and the furniture keep their warmth.

Do it in the morning, and after you cook. After a hot shower, run the bathroom fan and leave it going fifteen minutes after you're dressed. And crack the bedroom before bed, because a shut room with two people sleeping in it goes stale in a way you feel at three in the morning without knowing why.

2.3

Damp and dry

What the seasons do to a room

A house swings between two problems, and most houses get one of them in summer and the other in winter.

Damp announces itself before you see it. It's an earthy smell, like a cellar, or a washcloth left balled up in a bag. Once you know it you won't mistake it. When I smelled it in a house I went looking, and it was nearly always in the same few places.

Under the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink, back where the pipe goes into the wall.
The wall and the floor behind the toilet.
Closets and corners against an outside wall, and anything stored against them.
Window sills first thing in the morning, when the glass is beaded with water.
The back of the dryer. If the hose has worked loose it vents a whole load of hot wet air into the room.
Gutters and downspouts that dump water against the house instead of away from it.

Fix the cause and the smell goes. Spraying something over it only moves the date. And drying laundry on a rack in a closed room will damp a house down by itself in winter, so put the rack where a window is open.

Winter brings the opposite trouble. A furnace running all night dries a house right out. You wake with a dry mouth, a scratchy throat and a tickly cough that's gone by ten. A pan of water near a radiator helps some. A humidifier helps more if you already own one, and only if you empty and dry it every day, because a dirty one is worse than none. Don't chase it too far the other way, though, or the cellar smell is back by March.

I'll say the obvious thing, because it matters more than anything else on this page. A dry room in February and a cough that has hung around since Thanksgiving are two different animals. The first is housekeeping. The second is a phone call to your own doctor, and it shouldn't wait on the weather.

2.4

What I would not bother with

Where a few dollars actually goes further

Let me be plain, friend. Nothing in this entry is for sale and I'm not telling you to buy anything. But people ask what's worth the money, so here is what other people's houses taught me.

The best few dollars in this entry is the filter in your heating and cooling system. Almost nobody changes it. I have pulled filters out that were gray, furred over and plainly older than the last election. A cheap one changed on time beats an expensive one left in for two years.

So do this. When the new one goes in, write the date on the cardboard edge with a marker, and hook the next change to something you already do: the first of a month, the day the clocks change. If you can't reach it yourself, that's a fine thing to ask a son or a neighbor for. People want to be useful and never know what to offer.

After that: a mat at every outside door and shoes off indoors, which costs nothing. A box fan in a window pointing out, after you cook or after anybody paints. Bedding washed weekly in hot water.

What I'd leave on the shelf is anything whose whole job is to make a room smell like something else. Plug ins, sprays, scented candles. They add to the air, they don't take a thing out of it, and covering a smell never once fixed what was making it. A smell is information.

As for machines, I'd rather be honest than clever. A filtering machine can earn its keep in the one room where somebody spends most of the day, and if you own one, run it in there and change its filter too. But I have watched families spend real money on one while the furnace filter sat in the wall black as a chimney. Do the free things first. They are most of it.

In twenty years I never once walked into a house that was doing everything wrong. Not one. It was almost always a single thing nobody had looked at in years, because it lived behind a door that stays shut. You don't need a project. You need a Saturday morning and a flashlight.

None of this is medicine, and none of it stands in for asking somebody who knows the history. If a person in your house is getting winded on stairs they used to take without thinking, or coughing in a way that has become normal to everybody but a visitor, write it down and take it to their doctor. Clean air in a house is worth having. It is not an answer to a symptom, and it was never meant to be.