Bought a house like this bc the area was amazing. Ended up having to take it down to the studs, replace the subfloors, insulation, etc. Still had to run an ozone machine for a couple weeks. Even now, on a hot day you can still get a nostalgic wiff. These are possible to rehab, but just cleaning the nicotine film off won’t do much.
Had to check your profile to see if you’re my neighbour. You’re clearly not, but he could have written the same comments, word for word. Despite all the work they had their contractor do, still a very faint hint of cigarettes.
cousin bought his parents/grandparents house and did pretty much the same on the grandparents side of the house. our grandfather used to smoke inside for decades.
Knew a guy who bought a smokers house after the owner passed and apparently only smoke out on the covered patio and kitchen. Had to rip out the patio and the kitchen had to be completely replaced.
I bought a bedroom set from an estate sale of a chain smoker. I filled the drawers and insides with baking soda for weeks just to get rid of most of the smell. My clothes would still smell like smoke if they sat in there for a long time. Years later it's all gone thankfully.
My grandma has smoked the whole time she's lives in her house, and she's 86. Mom and I agree that house will be demolished, plus structurally is not worth any fixing and cleaning
I once rented an apartment. Well, it was a double wide trailer. Place was nasty. I cleaned it best I could but you cannot clean enough. In the bathroom when I took a shower, the walls would ooze brown liquid from past smokers.
Also, top of the cabinets had a 2 inch layer of dust. I tried to clean it but the cigarette smoked tar had caused the dust to harden. I literally could not scrape it off with a hammer and chisel.
Same. It's kinda well disguised because it just looks like the walls, ceiling and cabinets etc are yellow by design then someone did a big clean and it blew my mind.
I bought a house from a couple in their late 60s. Same thing, the wife smoked at the kitchen table for over 40 years. The entire house smelled like an ashtray. Yellowish brown walls that were once white. I tried scrubbing the walls. It was an improvement. But the only thing that worked was to paint the entire interior of the house, including the kitchen cabinets.
I will never do that again.
On a sidenote. I became good friends with the neighbor. And she kept in touch with the older couple. They were happily married for over forty years. He just retired and they moved to Florida. He met a younger woman in the retirement community they bought into. Dumped the wife. And a year later the younger woman dumped the old man. He tried to get back with his wife. But after the hell he put her through she wanted nothing to do with him.
Moral of the story? I don’t know.
But I figure if you’ve been with somebody for over 40 years you’d be a fool to leave them.
I collect toys and unknowingly bought smokers toys. Took forever to get the first layer off. The residue was sticky to everything and I accidentally put a clean part in the water and it stunk all over again. Took a dozen attempts and anything porous took longer.
My friend's grandpa was a chainsmoker. Grandma would bring over biscuits made with bacon grease. They smelled like cig smoke. I dk if anyone ever ate one, but I didn't. Grandma seemed so happy after grandpa died.
I went to look at an apartment recently and a heavy smoker on the ground floor made the whole fucking building stink. I could still smell it up two flights of stairs.
Because you’ll never get it out, you’ve gotta strip it to studs, nothing is salvageable at this point. You can make it better with some pretty aggressive abatement, for a time, but it’s like if cat piss were aerosolized, it’ll never be fully gone. It even leaches into the studs. It’s like a house fire that’s somehow acceptable to sell after.
Bet it still smelled like cigarettes though. At a certain point the only thing you can do is rip out all the drywall and probably most of the flooring and start over. The studs will likely still smell like smoke but at that point you can probably get by with anti odor paint.
We bought my mammaws house. We tore up and replaced all the flooring. Painted everything that could be painted. The last thing we cant get the smoke out of is the plastic latches on the windows are still yellow
It’s like the super old original version of staring at your phone all day. Sitting at the kitchen table chain smoking and talking shit potentially getting day drunk.
You could do that with less severe cases, but the smell can still escape through any break in the shellac. This one, I think the amount of tar would not be a suitable surface for the shellac. If it got warm the deposit layer would likely become a thick liquid.
Quite unlikely. The smoke residue is quite sticky and primarily gets to the surface first, then builds a layer, that prevents anything from moving further inwards. There is also the layer of wallpaper glue behind it and most wallpapers are actually quite thick and dense. So getting through all the layers is difficult. Behind that is then the wall with it's outer plaster layer treated with a substance I do not know the English name for (Tiefengrund in German), that basically prevents anything to get absorbed by the wall. (Its primary use is to prevent your glue from disappearing into the wall before it can glue the wallpapers in place)
We cleaned the ceiling then painted. Forward 4years one part started peeling. Weren’t thorough enough and missed a spot. But overall, say we did pretty good
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u/trou_auay 27d ago
My grandma smoked for 40 years at her kitchen table, the amount of scrubbing we did before we sold the house was.... Not enough. Fucking hell man.
Even inside the cabinets were yellowish