What I did on my winter non-vacation.

On my winter non-vacation, I woke up. I read my mail and LiveJournal. I attempted to kill redcountess with a sausages, bacon, egg and mushroom-induced heart attack. Then I went down the street for a torch, got the ladder out the garage and opened the manhole to the crawlspace to try to work out where the HELL the smell of mould, with a faint overtone of rotting flesh, is coming from.

The flat has a nicely fitted-out crawlspace, verging on an attic. There's some flooring, two lightbulbs and ridiculous quantities of broken furniture. I'm suspecting water has gotten into the furniture. The rotting meat smell may be an unfortunate pigeon or similar. However, I'm not keen to get in there and investigate for myself, as the ladder isn't tall enough and I don't feel like going through contortions getting up and worse ones getting back down.

So. What does one do in this situation? There was no smell Thursday morning, then vile and verging on the unlivable in the evening; less so Friday and today. I would say "fuck it, it's a rental" except it's horrible. arkady has offered to investigate herself (she's a lot smaller and lighter than me), but is unlikely to be over in the next couple of days. If it continues I'll hassle the agent. But I was wondering if any of you had suffered something similar in a rental property.