As hard as it is to believe, a lot of people still smoke cigarettes—nearly 30 million people in this country alone. Aside from the well-proven health impact, smoking also has a long list of unattractive physical effects, like yellow stains on your skin and hair, marks on your clothing, the delightful skin condition known as “smoker’s face,” lower bank accounts, and, of course, the overpowering smell.
It’s bad enough when you’re in a public space and have to breathe in someone’s secondhand smoke. What’s worse is how the impact of someone else’s smoking habit can affect you long after they’re gone through the magic of thirdhand smoke, which gets embedded in just about everything. If you’re a non-smoker and you move into a house previously occupied by a smoker, you’ll know immediately. The smell, stains, and general sense of unhealthiness will be pretty obvious—and gross.
But you don’t have to live with the ghosts of smokers past. Here’s how to effectively clean your new home to erase the effects of thirdhand smoke.
Before doing anything, open up the house. Open windows and doors and let the fresh air come in. Run some fans. Airing out the house won’t eliminate the stench, but it will give you the most promising starting point.
Then, throw out as much as you can. If you bought the place and have some budget, replacing carpets, appliances, and your air conditioning is the easiest way to get that stink out of there.
If that’s not an option, however, you can apply good old-fashioned elbow grease to deal with the worst of it. Grab a soot sponge and a bottle of tri-sodium phosphate (TSP) (the stuff the Red Cross recommends for getting fire smoke out of your home) and clean:
If your new, smoke-ruined home has an HVAC system, it’s going to be very, very hard to get it cleaned out. But HVAC systems are pricey, so you might need to tough it out for at least a few years. Here’s what you can do:
Your appliances, particularly your refrigerator, will also absorb a lot of thirdhand smoke. Cleaning these appliances thoroughly will mean pulling them away from the wall and getting to areas normally hidden away where smoke residue collects, which can be challenging and might require you to hire a repair professional. Don’t forget the refrigerator coils, which can get gummed up with cigarette smoke similarly to HVAC coils—but they’re typically not that hard to clean.
Aside from cleaning surfaces and appliances, you should consider a few other steps to clean your smoke-cursed home: