Had the chipmunk not poked its head out from between a gap in the bricks of the foundation of our 1905 farmhouse at the exact moment I looked up from planting bulbs, none of this would have happened.
Had I not said, “Oh look!” to my wife, also planting bulbs, and suggested the hole be blocked up, perhaps with steel wool, none of this would have happened.
“Toss a mothball in,” she suggested. Had she not ...
We had a 2-pound box of Enzo mothballs, divided into four eight-ounce packets. I trotted to the garage, grabbed one of the bags, returned to the house and poured it into the gap.
That was the staggeringly stupid part. Doubly so, because I know how vile mothballs are, had marveled how the intense smell punches through triple layers of plastic.
I knew this. And poured the whole bag in anyway. My thinking, to stretch the term, was: “I’m outside.”
You know what’s inside? The inner wall of the foundation. The mothballs tumbled into the inch-wide hollow gap between the inner and outer walls of the brick wall. Irretrievable. The odor permeated the entire house.
Our first move, after opening windows, was to grab a hose and spray water into the hole. Float them out or melt them. Mothballs don’t float. Nor melt. What to do?
Sunday night we headed to Lowe’s for a new shop vac. Bright and early Monday, I duct taped a section of thin garden hose — to fit in the gap — to the shop vac and snaked it in through the gap. It didn’t work.
My wife read online that vinegar eliminates mothball odor. We poured a couple gallons into the wall. That only works once the mothballs are gone. The smell intensified. We also read that mothballs are pesticides that can cause cancer, eye disease.
Monday afternoon I took a drilling hammer and a cold chisel and loosened a couple bricks in the basement where I thought the mothballs might collect, and dug out a lot of dirt that had drifted into the wall over the years. But no mothballs.
As a homeowner, you know you’ve screwed up when you find yourself hammering bricks out of your foundation wall.
Monday ebbed, the thought that I ruined our house intensified. My wife said, “Call a professional,” and I did. Three: US Waterproofing and other basement fix-it types. I also ordered an endoscope online. A tiny camera on a snaking black wire. Thirty bucks.
Monday night we slept in our older boys room, where the smell hadn’t yet reached, while I played an endless loop of “You’re an idiot” in my head, wishing passionately to go back in time. Why didn’t I just stuff the whole bag in, on a string, so it could be pulled out? Why? Why?
The endoscope arrived about 5 a.m. God bless Amazon. Dawn found me out front. “I can see them!” I said. Inches from the opening, little groups of mothballs, twos and threes. Inches away. See them, but couldn’t reach them, not even when I took the drilling hammer and chipped the gap wider.
Off to Ace Hardware for one of those little flexible four-pronged grippers. I taped the endoscope to it.
My improvised tool worked. I bloodied my hands, manipulating the device into the wall but didn’t care. Over three hours, I withdrew 23 mothballs from the front of the house. Hope flickered.
Tuesday afternoon, one of the companies said I needed a mason. “Can you recommend one?” I pleaded. One gave me the number of someone named Sergio. I called Sergio. He said he could come by early the next morning.
Two a.m. Wednesday I returned to the basement. Using my gripper tool, I managed to laboriously fish out one mothball from inside the wall. This took an hour. No. 24.
Three a.m. was the lowest point. Lying in my son’s room, with the chess trophies lining the walls. Staring into the darkness, so overwhelmed it felt almost like calm. We’d have to sell the house — no, we couldn’t, not with that mothball stink. Nobody would buy it. The odor can take a year to dissipate. If it ever does. We’d have to tear out the entire basement wall. “We’ll need a line of credit,” my wife said.
At dawn I began to dig a trench in front of the house — figuring, get down deeper.
Sergio Mejia arrived. He took a pneumatic hammer, chiseled out bricks from the front of the foundation. Then I set him up in the basement, to work the other side, while I grabbed my gripper tool and managed to extract a single mothball.
When I went into the basement, he had removed about 10 bricks, along a line where the top of the dirt was. I started scooping out handfuls of dirt and dumping them on the floor, One handful contained a scattering of mothballs. Joy. More digging. More mothballs. Big handfuls. We’d hit the mother lode. We pulled another 34 mothballs out of the wall.
In all, we collected 59 dirty mothballs. Judging from the remaining bags, we missed three or four. The smell quickly dissipated. The house is back to normal.
A few lessons:
1) Think first. Even supposedly smart people can do staggeringly stupid things.
2) Work the problem. Despair is too easy. You screw something up, you fix it.
3) Hire a professional. If you need masonry work, call Sergio Mejia at SMG Masonry Restoration of Des Plaines. He’s the hero of this story. He saved us.
4) Failed solutions are the steps toward success. Every bad idea — the water, the shop vac, the vinegar — brought us closer to fixing the problem.
5) Appreciate what you have, because in a moment it could be gone.
