Get the Smoke Smell Out of Your House Cheaply: Just Follow These 6 Simple Steps 

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Smoking in your home doesn’t just harm indoor air quality and create an unhealthy environment for your family and pets. It also severely reduces your home’s value because no nonsmoker wants to pay top dollar to live in a home that smells bad. When making an offer for your home, a potential buyer will automatically deduct tens of thousands of dollars to account for the high cost of smoke remediation. 

Here’s the thing, though – most of the work involved in getting the smoke smell out of a house doesn’t actually require expensive professional help. In fact, you can actually do a lot of it yourself – and in this guide, we’re going to lay out a simple roadmap for you to follow. 

Are you trying to make your home a better place to live in now that you’ve quit smoking? Maybe you’re getting ready to put your home on the market, and you want to make sure that you’ll earn the most money possible. Perhaps you’ve actually gotten a bargain on a formerly smoke-filled home yourself, and now you want to clean it up. Whatever the reason, we’re going to explain exactly how to do it. 

Stop Smoking in Your House 

This first piece of advice might sound like a bit of a no-brainer, but it’s important to make the point that getting the smoke smell out of your house will be a complete waste of your time and money if you continue smoking in the home afterwards. Whether you’re planning to sell your home or are simply cleaning it for your own enjoyment, the first step has to be making a commitment that you’ll never smoke in the house again. You can do this in two different ways. You can enjoy your cigarettes outside, or you can find a smoke-free alternative that allows you to get your nicotine fix indoors without stinking up the house. Grab some Geek Bars and try using them instead. You might enjoy the experience so much that you’ll end up switching to vaping on a full-time basis. 

Clean or Replace Soft Items 

If you want to get the smell of smoke out of a house, the items that are soft and porous are the first things you’ll want to address because those are the things that will absorb the smoke most readily. These include things like curtains, bedsheets, blankets, towels and carpets.  

Note that with these items and all of the other items we’re going to discuss in this article, replacing an item that smells like smoke always requires far less effort than cleaning it. If you have a smelly item that you can afford to replace, save yourself the work and replace that item instead of trying to get the smoke smell out. 

To remove the smell of smoke from items that are machine washable, take those things to a local laundromat. Wash them in a high-capacity machine and add a generous amount of white vinegar to the load. Vinegar is quite effective when it comes to neutralizing the smell of smoke, and we’ll be recommending it more than once in this guide. 

You can’t wash your carpets at the laundromat, of course – so to clean them, you’ll want to rent a carpet cleaner from your local supermarket. Use a strong enzyme-based cleaner and add some white vinegar. 

Clean or Replace Your Furniture 

Furniture is also soft, but it’s a special case because it’s expensive to replace and often can’t withstand harsh cleaning methods. If your furniture is upholstered with fabric, you can clean it with a steam cleaner. Some of the carpet cleaners that you can rent at supermarkets actually have steam attachments. Leather furniture is a bit trickier. You can clean the surface of leather furniture with a good leather cleaning compound, but the smell may remain. In this case, it might be possible to remove and replace the furniture’s stuffing to minimize any lingering smoke odor. 

You can also remove much of the smoke smell by putting your furniture outdoors in direct sunlight for a few hours. The sun’s ultraviolet radiation can help to neutralize the odor. You have to be careful with this method, though, as sunlight can also discolor many fabrics. 

Clean Hard Items 

While you’re busy cleaning your drapes and furniture, the hard surfaces in your home – such as the windows, walls, ceilings and hard floors – should be easily accessible. So, you should take the opportunity to give those areas a good cleaning. You can remove smoke residue from hard surfaces using soft rags dipped in warm water with mild detergent and white vinegar. A standard ammonia-based window cleaner will remove the residue from your windows.  

If your home has a powerful smell from heavy smoking, there is another thing that you can do to remove the smoke smell permanently: You can repaint your home’s interior with odor-encapsulating paint. This type of paint creates an airtight film that seals the residue and eliminates the smell permanently. 

Clean Your HVAC System 

If your home has a central heating and/or air-conditioning system, you’ll need to give it a thorough cleaning if you want to get the smoke smell out because the HVAC system will circulate the smoke throughout the entire home. You’ll need to clean the system’s coils, and you’ll need to clean all of the home’s ductwork as well. This is one case where it’s probably best to hire professional help because it costs less to have a professional do the job than to repair or replace something that’s damaged because the work was done incorrectly. You’ll also need to replace the system’s filter; that’s something you can do on your own. 

Purify the Air 

Once you’ve done all of the things outlined in this guide, the final step is to purify the air to maintain your home and remove any residual smoke smell from hard-to-reach areas. The ideal solution will probably involve some combination of these three things. 

  • You can buy an air purifier that uses a fan to circulate the air through filters. The filter stages in a good air purifier will probably include an activated charcoal filter to absorb airborne odor-causing molecules and a HEPA filter to remove microscopic allergens. Air purifiers aren’t cheap, but they’re very effective. 
  • You can place bags of activated charcoal in tight spaces like under furniture and in closets. 
  • In the worst case, you can remove an extremely persistent smoke smell by renting an ozone generator and running it in your home for several hours. The ozone will remove the smell by oxidizing the odor-causing molecules. Note, though, that ozone is harmful to living things – so you’ll need to use an ozone generator with extreme care. This is another case where you might find it useful to hire a professional. 

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