Wellll, new smells are hard.

Since I stopped smoking, I’ve remembered one of the reasons I smoked, that being an annoyingly sensitive sniffer. Not professional grade like the noses at perfume companies, but enough to detect a cigarette being smoked outside on the other side of the house.

I find the best way to describe unusual things to my family is to break it down first.

Most smells are built up of multiple chemicals, like tobacco smoke having tar, nicotine, formaldehyde, etc. When you pick the smell apart in your head, you can usually identity and exclude those that you already know, leaving the rest as something you can analyze. For example, the benzene, toluene, and cresol contribute to the woody scent underneath the bigger smells like formaldehyde. Which, formaldehyde is the one that damps the sense of smell most, but it has its own distinct smell.

So, when you sniff your new place, you can, as you did here, exclude some things, like mold because you’d recognize that itchy, wet, almost earthy/petrichor blend.

Remodels of old buildings run high to solvents and adhesives. So does printing, though printing is even more wide open. I think you’d recognize the common offgassing stuff like formaldehyde (it really creeps into a lot of things), or polyurethane glues.

So, the first thing I’d sniff for is a hint of acrid, almost burny layer. If that’s there, then you’re likely running into something like an acid that was used in printing, and can ventilate accordingly while seeing if there’s anything else you need to do.

If there’s something fruity to it, or something like nail polish remover, you’re probably dealing with ketones, which is a class of chemicals used in printing and can be found in some construction materials.

If it’s similarly “itchy” the way acidic residue can be, and it comes with a bit of ammonia underneath or alongside, you’d be looking at lye, or a similar substance. That’s not unusual in bathrooms in general, so you may have smelled it before and not know what it was. When lye reacts with the usual clogging offenders you get that acrid bit. If you run into it with an ammonia note, then you’re likely dealing with something where it was reacting with chemicals outside of a regular toilet situation, which would point back to something industrial.

Inks, or at least the ones I’ve smelled, tend to have a metallic tang to them, usually combined with a solvent of some kind or another.

Wallpaper, at least the kinds you find in apartments here in the US, tend to have a plasticky smell, even when there’s not much plastic involved because of how it’s made and the adhesive. So that’s a possibility.

All of which is just the stuff that’s similar enough to remind me of cigarette smoke as opposed to cigar or pipe tobacco. A lot of the time, when our brain pulls up a comparison like that, where it’s like smokers’ breath but not, that’s because there’s a chemical in common, often multiple. It just won’t be the exact ratios, or all of the component chemicals.

If I had to guess, I’d point to cleaning or construction chemicals mixing before you moved in, maybe weeks before, and having had time to interact. Bleach can do that, btw. End up smelling like old cigarettes when it gets diluted and soaks into something. Any new chemical is going to react a little, and instead of that dirty foot in pool water thing that is starts with, you can run into those musty compounds instead. I’m not saying it is bleach, just that it’s likely to be something akin to that, where a solvent or other chemical is blending with other stuff and throwing it off.

Maybe an enzymatic cleaner? The stuff I use on our chicken gear gets that funky breath smell when it sits. Saliva enzymes and proteins + smoke is what generates that actual stale breath, so a similar mix could be involved.