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Critters Stink Up Liverpool Family's Holiday Season
Thanks to an unexpected encounter with wildlife, it’s been a pretty stinky Christmas season for Liverpool residents Chris and Jill Taylor and their two young children.
The Taylors came home Dec. 7 to their three-level home to find “an incredibly strong skunk odor” filling their house.
“It literally burned your eyes and you could taste it. It was that thick,” Jill said. “We looked around, expecting to see a skunk in every corner. We didn’t find one. But with the kids ... we decided we couldn’t stay there.”
It turns out some skunks found their way under the Taylors’ three-season Florida room.
“We can only assume another animal entered the den and one or more skunk(s) sprayed,” Jill said. “The odor drafted into our crawl space and furnace room where the furnace cycled the odor byproduct into every room and onto every surface (of the house).”
What made it worse, she said, was that this happened after the area had just received 43-plus inches of snow in four days.
“So the furnace was running, pretty much constantly,” she said.
Chris Taylor is one of the top country singers in Central New York. His group, Chris Taylor and the Custom Taylor Band, won a Sammy (Syracuse Area Music Award) this year. Jill is an account service consultant for Excellus.
Since their house was uninhabitable, the Taylors grabbed a few clothes, some food and other needed things and took off to a friend’s house, where they stayed for two days. Afterward, they relocated to The Residence Inn by Marriott in East Syracuse, where they’ve been ever since. The couple has two daughters: Leah, 3, and Myah, who is 9 months.
The couple put a claim into their homeowner’s insurance, which informed them that they were responsible for trapping and removing any skunks.
“We called 1-800-Critter,” Jill said.
Workers for the company, Critter Control, trapped one live skunk and then removed the traps earlier this week, deciding there were no more.
But there was another — a dead one.
It was found this past Monday, when CNY Fire Emergency Services, the company hired by the Taylors’ insurance company to get rid of the skunky smell in the house, removed the rug, padding and floorboards of the Florida room.
“I have a picture of it. It was big. It weighed 25 pounds,” Jill said. “My 9-month-old weighs only 22 pounds.”
For more than a week now, workers from CNY have been inside the Taylor’s home, washing and using all sorts of high-tech approaches to removing the stink from the air.
As of Thursday, the smell was 99 percent gone and the Taylors were expecting to return to their 1,800-square-foot house today. They don’t have a tree up yet.
“I did some shopping on Black Friday, but I haven’t been out since,” Jill said.
Credits: By David Figura - The Post-Standard
