I’ve been looking at purchasing a house of a while now, and I think I’ve found one I like. There a few repais that’ll need to be made, to the roof and the electrical wiring, but I’ll factor those into my offering price.
The one concern I have is that the former owners were smokers, and as such, the house has a bit of that ‘smoke smell’ in the lower level and the master bedroom. The master bedroom in paticular is quite smoky… the walls and celing have visible tar stains on them. My plan for dealing with the situation is replace the wallpaper and repaint the ceilings of the rooms. Is there anything I need to know specifically about getting smoke stains and smoke smell removed?
You will at the very least need to repaint all walls and ceilings (as you suggested). Steam cleaning and shampooing all carpets will most likely also be necessary. If there is some sort of central heating and cooling system, you will need that cleaned out professionally. The smoke can get in there and you will have reside on all the surfaces inside, which will make your AC and especially your heated air stink.
As far as painting goes, there is a product called Kilz, available at Home Depot and Lowe’s (or any other home-store type places) that will seal the walls. Otherwise when you paint, the nicotine stains will eventually bleed though. It’s a heavy-duty sealer/primer. You might need two coats.
We bought our house from heavy smokers with incontinent dogs, and the place was just freaking nasty. We removed all the rugs and got rid of the vertical blinds and all the drapes and curtains.
We even washed the walls before using the Kilz, and then did two coats of it, then painted.
Good luck to you.
After cleaning everything you want to keep, find a product called Fire D. It’s an aerosol fogger made for use after a fire, but it works great on cigarette smoke, too.
I think you might be underestimating how offensive the smoke smell will be (I assume you’re a non-smoker). It will waft out of every surface, long after there has been no smoke for years. Think of it as the house has been steeped in smoke for a while, and it is everywhere. I would have to think long and hard about buying a house that has had recent smokers in it - at the very least, all carpets, blinds, drapes need to be replaced, all painted surfaces need to be Killz’ed (my husband, the ex-painter agrees on this treatment), and I’m not sure how you get the smell out of the furnace and ducts and appliances (when you open the oven door, the smell of smoke will waft out).
You might want to consider getting a quote from a disaster-cleaning type company, and include that reduction in the price of the house, too.
If I burnt the toast for a couple of hours every day, every day of the year, for a couple of years, it would probably smell similar to a house that smokers have lived in. Your “bit of smokiness” is my “Eww! Gross! How do people live like this?”
Make sure the Kilz you buy is the oil based stuff. The same company makes another product called Kilz 2 that is water base, but it does not block stains or odors very well. FWIW I used to be Paint Department Manager in a home improvement type of store.
I’ve heard that some hotels will rent you a ozone generator which they use to get rid of some odors, I don’t know if it will help with cigarette smoke, but it should get into all places, far more then you can reach.
FWIW my house was owned by a couple of chain smokers. When we moved in we shampooed all the rugs, replaced or washed the drapes, washed the walls, and painted. some rooms right away, others as time allowed.
Within a few days, no smoke smell was decernable in the house.
YMMV
Rather than slapping paint on the walls, an inexpensive cleaner/degreaser generally does wonders to resolve the problem. TSP or trisodium phosphate is a granular product sold in big box stores and some supermarkets. Mixed with water, it does a great job of removing surface dirt, oily deposits from cooking and such, and has the bonus of being a deglosser which preps the painted surface for better adhesion of a new paint coat. Use eye and skin protection, keep it away from aluminum, and you’ll be fine.
Kilz is touted by many, but IMO it can’t hold a candle to the products made by Zinsser. From the main page, click Products> Primer Sealers. BIN is my favorite, although cleanup is a bit of a PITA because it is pigmented shellac, but it works.
Seconded. You can buy it premixed in spray bottles as well. You’ll be amazed at the brown sludge that slides off your walls. It’s much more effective at prepping the walls for primer/sealer/paint than simply washing them.
I was a kid at the time, but when my mom bought a house that had been badly smoked (with the brown curtains of nicotine dripping down the walls), we tore out every carpet in the place, scrubbed the heck out of all hard surfaces, and painted over the walls a couple of layers thick. It turned out pretty well. It was a little smoky smelling for a while, as I recall, but it wasn’t so bad. I seem to remember it affecting the wood cabinetry in the kitchen, as well, but I’m not 100% on it. If you think the cabinets are ugly anyway, stripping the wood and re-varnishing it might help the freshness of the kitchen too.
Yes, it did work.
I know I posted about this in a thread called, “What Horrors Did the Previous Owners of Your House Leave Behind?” or something like that.
When we washed the walls and ceilings (with plain old Windex), the brown sludge that came off was beyond disgusting. The rags were actually oily-feeling. Even the kitchen cabinets and the appliances were covered in tar or nicotine or whatever it is that cigarettes leave behind. That stuff is nasty.
We then used Kilz.
The floors were worse. They’re fairly decent hardwood floors - not gorgeous yellow pine, but still nice wood floors. The husband was partially disabled and used a walker. They just had area rugs, and to keep him from tripping, they duct-taped all the edges of the rugs down, all the way around. It had been that way for several years. Add in the incontinent dogs (plural - three of them), and the floors had black stains from dog urine and sticky duct tape residue. We sanded off the tape residue and the pee stains, and had wall-to-wall carpeting laid down, but had the intention of refinishing the floors one day. We’ve been here 11 years, and still haven’t done it yet - too many other projects always pop up. The joys of owning a house!
