So…  the smell.

Turns out that our basement floor was too close to the sewer to install a trap between the floor and the pipes.  In the 60s or 70s when they updated the plumbing in the house and/or got tired of the basement flooding, they put a drain in the middle of the basement floor, then just ran a pipe directly from our basement floor into the pipe.  The smell I’ve been gagging over is sewer smell – straight from the sewer into our basement, and into the rest of our house via the space around the basement door and the heating/cooling system fan.  Which draws air straight from the basement.

And David couldn’t smell it. 

And people lived like this for 40 or 50 years.

Not us, not anymore.  We paid a plumber $50 to tell us what the problem was and to bring us a cap contraption they designed for folks like us.  Until we get that from him, we’ve improvised with a gallon ice cream bucket – it’s turned upside-down over the drain from whence the smell comes.