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.