Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Removing cigarette smoke smell

Wife and I found a great piece of property with a nice house for a reasonable price, but it's been smoked in. The carpets/flooring/window coverings would come out. I see Kilz primer and read about other cleaning techniques (TSP, vinegar, etc) and Ozone cleaners, but is there any realistic way to rid a place of that stench or is it snake oil?

Professionl ionizer?

Carpet and paint should go a long way. New window coverings obviously.

Seems like hard surface floorings could be cleaned up with some powerful potion to knock the smell out.

Happy B-day.

New carpets and paint will help the smell greatly. An ionizer will also help. With that done and some deodorizers it should be fine. If a damp environment it may come and go but in drier areas it should go and stay gone.....

When I worked in real estate we had a helluva problem with this, you can do it but it's not a really simple task. Removing the carpets will help quite a bit. Next, hire a crew to come in and vigorously scrub every square inch of the interior of the house to include the exposed subflooring, ceilings, walls, inside closets, light fixtures, etc. You MUST do this before doing any painting or else the brown nicotine stains will bleed through the paint. Then, only then, go through and give it a nice top-to-bottom paint job, using Kilz to start and then your finish coats. BTW, take all the drapes, blinds, curtains outside and burn them. Get new ones. Lastly, put in the new floor coverings.

Don't be scared to take this on. Sounds like quite a bit of work, and it may be, but when you get done you will have a bright fresh home to move into. Plus, don't forget, you should be very adamant in beating the seller down on his price due to the stench and the cost of repairs.

Good luck.

Riley just got a screaming deal on a truck because the owner smoked heavy and no one wanted to mess with it.

Happy B-day!!

Was he successful in killing the smell or just riding around with his head out the window?...

This place is bad, the kind of place you walk through it and it permeates your clothes bad, and no one is living there right now.

After you wash it up a good coat of paint

No one living there means closed up tight so just airing the place out may be a good start.

An ionizer will work wonders.

Use a professional Ionizer and wash the walls, ceiling, and any hard floors with TSP, the real stuff not the Phosphate free stuff.

Then primer the walls and ceiling with Killz and repaint.

This is what we did in my daughters house and you can't smell anything anymore.

The Ionizer may not even be necessary, it wasn't in my daughters house.

GW, my house same scenario. I replaced everything floors up. Anything less won't get rid of that smell. You might consider using some cedar on the interior to help.

Former owner hung air fresheners in there so heavy it made people dizzy during the test drive... Riley took it to a place for a fancy detailing and they got a lot of it out. It is far from perfect but just a few years old and half of Blue Book... very low miles...

Do you know if TSP safe to use on kitchen cabinets?

TSP is very gentle and almost any cabinet would handle it fine.

I'm not positive, I don't think I'd use it just because of the water not being good for them. For wood cabinets I've always used Liquid Gold.

Did you gut the kitchen? The cabinets and appliances are in good shape (other than the smell), so would hate to have to trash them, plus that would be a big expense to replace.

I wouldn't think you'd need to replace cabinets. I kept the boxes, added on, and put new face frames on, then painted them. Every single thing got replaced and or painted.

BTW, Kilz is not needed for priming your walls. Shellac is cheaper and will do everything for smoke smell that Kilz will. And it will actually do as much for mold, too...

Water washing with TSP on wooden cabinets is NOT a problem.

The big ozone machines, at least 200 cfm.
They will take the smell from a corpse in a car.

Sounds like you might need to go commercial and treat it like a restaurant. I had to do that for 3 properties and I could still smell it.

In one of my properties the curry and other spice odors were worse than the tobacco smell. However, commercial odor removers got the job done.

I forget who we went with but it was along the lines of ServPro.

New paint, carpet and other Fabreeze cosmetics ain't gonna' cut it for sure.

Have you tried getting a quote/estimate from a professional company that deals with smoke damage from fires and such. You could always do the removing of the drapes and carpeting etc, leave the pros to do the washdown and smell removal?

Put the estimate/quote costs in your offer and either the seller pays, seller drops price, you split with seller, etc. Lots of options depending on how badly you want the place.

Geno

We just looked at it this morning. Liked everything about it other than the cigarette smell. Wife is not convinced we could ever get the smell out.

Burn it

Didn't have to replace them at my daughters either, just used the liquid gold.

It will come out. My daughters house was owed by crackheads, they smoked pot and cigarettes and who knows what else. after the work was done you'd never know anyone had ever smoked in it.

One thing for sure...I would put accountability back on the seller.

Maybe even tie it to a timeline that if not totally resolved penalties are encountered.

So thankful I don't smoke!!

The ozinizer will help a lot. Airing. Odo-Ban mixed strong. Home Depot sells a smoke spray that helps when a smoker sneaks in the house or goes by. Don't forget the air ducts and furnace/AC.

We bought a car that passed at the car lot, first hot day cigar smell came out everywhere. We blew Odo ban through the seats, washed everrything with it, shampooed the covers and drove around with the windows open. Got rid of the odor.

Start smoking. You will never notice the smell then.

Lol, I'm not really sure if theres a better solution!

Might want to address the HVAC best as possible as well.

the problem is , tar in cigarette reacts with the fabric and it is not reversible.

P.

Time works too.

He may want to move in THIS century.....

I've looked at properties like that. I simply leave and inform the realtor that if they take me to another one like it our business is concluded.

There is too much time and aggravation involved in trying to remedy the problem.

It takes about a year Einstein

Air and ozone will kill the majority of it. A coat of Killz and repaint it's all good

Ionizer. That's what car dealers and hotels use. Can make it smell like new.

Remove carpet. Spray everything with a 30% chlorine bleach soln.

Tell him not to loan it.

I had a friend in Florida that was a chainsmoker 4 or more packs a day. I guess that was a result of being a Miami PO for 20 years. He died from lung cancer in his 50's. His widow did not smoke but probably suffered from second hand smoke. Everytime I visited himupon returning home I smelled like an ashtray and had to take a shower and get the clothes I was wearing washed.

Every single AC intake and vent was almost brown and that contrasted nicely with the white ceiling paint and walls. She removed all the carpeting and drapes, replaced or deep cleaned the vents and pickups, had a professional home cleaner come in and wipe down all appliances and cabinets and then the home was painted, pretty sure the mattresses were replaced as well. There was very little if any evidence of a smoker having lived there.

Called Servpro this morning and they're saying anywhere between $6k - $8k to clean the place top to bottom, including heat ducts, furnace coils, etc. and then running an Ionizer for up to a five days. We may still consider making an offer, but if we do, it will be a lowball to allow for new carpets, flooring, window coverings, and the above listed head to toe cleaning and then re-painting. I'm more willing to give it a shot than the wife is.

Good luck with the deal GW. Hope it works out for you.

Servpro is not cheap, I would not use them. If I had a business I would because you can write it off . You can get the place professionally cleaned, carpets replaced,window coverings replaced and repainted for much less then that. You can rent an Ionizer . It would not dissuade me from buying the place if I liked it that much

That sucks, too bad.

Dump gas in it and throw a match in.

You could always take up smoking,then you wouldn't notice.

There's an echo in here

Sheit, guess I shoulda read all the replies before trying to be smart azz!

Major duct cleaning.

Only thing I can add perhaps is that if Kilz does not work well enough you can try Zinsser's B-I-N primer. It is a shellac based primer that is supposed to be able to seal odor from cat urine. If it can do that, ciggy smoke should be a cakewalk. It cost about $40 a gallon so I would give Kilz or Cover Stain a shot first.