skunk smell, help?

[Lisa F]

Last night I was woken up by the most awful smell. It was so wretched it made me want to vomit. I realized that the skunks who HAD been living under the neighbor's porch but seemed to have been gone all summer were back and something disturbed them. I thought I'd never get back to sleep until I remembered I have one of those "herbal heat packs" so I heated it up and put it on myself to mask the skunk smell.

The problem with the neighbor's house is that it's in probate being argued by the two grandkids of the owner. The owner died like 20 years ago and part of his will allowed his "girlfriend" to live in the house until she no longer wished to and now she is in her 90's and had a stroke so she moved in with her (VERY VERY unpleasant and obnoxious) children. You can imagine what a house that has had a single old lady living in it for 20 years and has sat vacant for 2 looks like and given how downright nasty her kids are I highly doubt if we did figure out how to contact them (they don't even come by to mow the grass or shovel the snow and the citations are piling up on that house) that they would do anything about the skunks. We are considering just paying someone ourselves to remove them but then I think we'd have to figure out how to repair the underside of their porch to keep more skunks from getting in (skunks are kind of a big issue in this area, they are everywhere) and that involves doing work on someone else's property, and I'm not sure that would fly.

The smell is just about unbearable to me though. The herb pack did a pretty good job of masking it enough that I can get some sleep and not feel like I wanted to vomit (after a while the stink did fade a bit too, the skunk must have sprayed something right at 3am when the smell woke me up) but I was wondering if anyone had any better suggestions for masking the smell until we come up with a better solution. Burning incense? Not something I'd want to do at 3am and then go back to sleep. Is there something I can put on my upper lip that would mask the smell and allow me to sleep? Any other ideas? DH has a chronic stuffed nose and terrible sense of smell so it's faint to him and doesn't bother him in the least but I have my jewish grandma's sense of smell... she can smell someone with BO from 30 paces. ack!

 

[amid chaos]

First..turn off your heat when the skunk sprays.. Your furnace just sucks up the smelly air, heats it and throws it back out at you...even worse than before.

Call animal control, they may remove the skunks for you and even repair the porch.

 

[ChrisnSteph]

Fortunately for you you, skunk smell usually goes away in 12-24 hours, so it's only temporary. I have no advice on what to do in the meantime other than what amid chaos just said above. Good luck!

 

[PixieDust32]

Oh Gosh! What a mess.

Yup, call animal control first and then I saw in Mythbusters that they used Tomato juice, Milk, bleach to get the smell off.

Good Luck

 

[msdznyduck]

Moth balls................throw them under the porch and around your house so they don't come and find a better place to sleep near your house. They really hate the smell of camphor. Replenish them after about a month or so, when you don't see them in the yard.

 

[BalooTheBear]

From Mythbusters - Hydrogen Peroxide, Baking Soda, and a dab of Detergent.... I don't remember the correct mixture of each, but you can look it up on Google...

I used this when I ran over a skunk - it WORKS!!! Mix ingredients an put it in a spray bottle. Keep spraying until smell goes away... May take a couple of sprayings....