How to get the smell of smoke out of your house advice, Vape tips, Home smoking guide

How to Get the Smell Out of Your Home After You Quit Smoking

5 Oct 2020

One of the reasons why smoking is so bad for your self-esteem is because you know that everyone can smell it on you. What’s even worse is that everyone who visits your home can smell the stale smoke on your walls, ceilings, carpets, curtains and everything else.

When you’re the one doing the smoking, you may not notice how bad the smell is. According to the Scudo Property Management team, it’s going to be painfully evident just how terrible your home smells, though, as soon as you quit. Who wants to come home every day to a reminder of how difficult it was to quit the world’s deadliest legal habit?

Unless you’re willing to sell your home at a deep discount and buy another, you’re stuck with the house you have. That means you’ve got to get the smoke smell out if you want to make living in your home as nice as it can be.

Whether you quit smoking cold turkey or with the help of a vaping kit from a company like Premium Vape, you’ve got some work to do. The bad news is that hiring a professional smoke remediator can be extremely expensive. Here’s the good news, though: With a few supplies and a lot of effort on your part, you can definitely do the work yourself. Here’s how to remove the smell of smoke from your home.

Clean Hard Surfaces Such as Walls, Ceilings and Hard Floors

Industrial cleaning chemicals may work very well, but they’re often also quite poisonous. Everyone is on the lookout for safer household cleaners these days, and here’s a bit of great news for you: Regular white vinegar is one of the most effective neutralizers of stale smoke that you will find anywhere.

To clean the hard surfaces in your home, get a sponge or washcloth and fill a spray bottle with vinegar. Spray your walls, ceilings and hard floors liberally and scrub, scrub, scrub until you’ve removed all of the sticky yellow tar.

Clean Soft Surfaces Such as Furniture and Carpets

Getting the smoke smell out of your home’s hard surfaces is fairly easy, but getting the smell out of the soft surfaces will be significantly more difficult. Start by vacuuming everything thoroughly. Move the furniture and clean under it. Remove the cushions and vacuum under them with a crevice tool. When you’re sure that you’ve removed as much of the dust as possible, it’s time for a deeper clean.

Baking soda is very effective at absorbing unpleasant smells, so the next step in your smoke remediation project will be to sprinkle a generous layer of baking soda on all of your carpets and non-leather furniture. Leave the baking soda there for several hours or overnight if possible before vacuuming it up.

If you can still smell smoke on your home’s soft surfaces after treating them with baking soda, you’ll want to rent a steam cleaner from your local supermarket. Spray the surfaces with white vinegar before washing them.

As a final step toward getting the smoke smell out for good, you can also try moving your furniture outside and leaving it in direct sunlight for a while. The ultraviolet radiation from the sun breaks down the foul-smelling molecules. You don’t want to leave your furniture in the sun for too long, though, because the radiation can also cause the colors to fade.

Clean Bedding and Curtains at a Laundromat

One of the reasons why it’s so difficult to clean bulky fabric items like bedding and curtains at home is because your washing machine is too small; there isn’t enough room for the detergent to really penetrate. Bring your bedding and curtains to a laundromat and use the large machines to wash them more thoroughly. As with the other soft items in your home, add white vinegar to each laundry load to help neutralize the smoke smell.

Before you bring your bedding and curtains to the laundromat, you should estimate how much it will cost to wash those items. Remember that washing things individually is ideal for effective cleaning, and high-end laundromats aren’t cheap. You may find that it’ll only cost a bit more to replace those items. Replacement is a better option if you can afford to do it.

Clean Your Central Air Conditioning or Heating System

After you’ve cleaned the items in your home, the next thing you’ll want to do is clean the air circulating throughout your home. Your home’s air handling equipment – such as the evaporator coil of your air conditioner – can become extremely dirty if you smoke in your home. If you aren’t comfortable cleaning that equipment, this would be a case in which hiring a professional would be a good investment. You’ll also want to replace any air filters and scrub out the ducts if possible.

Get an Air Purifier and Some Activated Charcoal

One of the unpleasant aspects of home smoke remediation is that, once you’ve cleaned the areas that are easy to reach, the smell clinging to the hard-to-reach areas becomes more noticeable. It might be a long time before you’re no longer able to find any nook or out-of-the-way area in your home that still smells like smoke.

To make the process of cleaning those last bits of your home easier, you need something that does the work for you. Buy some bags of activated charcoal and place them in areas such as under sinks, in your basement, in your attic and inside closets. Activated charcoal works extremely well for absorbing unpleasant smells, and you can refresh the bags when needed by placing them in direct sunlight for a few hours.

It’s also a good idea to buy an air purifier with an activated charcoal stage and a HEPA filter stage. The activated charcoal stage is the most important part of the air purifier for removing the smoke smell from your home, but the HEPA filter stage is also important because it removes other contaminants such as pollen and pet dander.

Most importantly, an air purifier has a fan that forces air to circulate through the filters. If you’ve completed all of the other steps in this article, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll no longer be able to smell smoke anywhere in your home after you’ve used a good air purifier for a few months.

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