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joyjoy45

Mysterious Odor!! Can a new roof make your house stink??

joyjoy45
12 years ago

My sister has smelled an odor in her house for about three months or so. It began after she had a hail-damaged roof replaced with dimensional shingles.

This odor doesn't necessarily always permeate the whole house (but it sometimes does). You can sometimes smell it more in one room or part of the house than in others. Sometimes you just seem to run into a pocket of it or it just wafts by you. It is present in the garage.

Some have described the odor as chemical, ashy, and/or sweet. It is more pronounced for and offensive to my sister than to others, but others have definitely smelled it.

She has made many phone calls, had various professional people come to her home, and picked the brain of everyone she can think of. Her house is nine or ten years old, and the only things different are the new roof, a heating/cooling unit which was replaced a year or so ago, and a prefinished wood floor which was installed in one room last fall. The heating/cooling unit has been thoroughly inspected with no problems. Pieces of the flooring have been placed in an air tight bag or heated in the microwave to see if they would give off any odor. They didn't.

The roofer came back and made sure that nothing was covered on the roof that shouldn't be. But she later found a piece of a roofing tile and broke it. What she smelled on the "inside" of the roofing tile is what she is smelling in her house.

We have been telling ourselves that you probably couldn't smell your roof inside your house, but I read online today that differing barometric pressures from outside to inside could cause odors to be pulled inside.

Has anybody else had or heard of a similar situation??? Any info at all would be so appreciated. She is at her wit's end!!!

(Also posted on Home Disasters)