Getting Rid of Smoke Smell

It doesn’t take a full housefire for a smoke smell to linger. Find out which odor removal is DIY-friendly, and which requires a professional touch.

LESLIE: Margie in Maryland needs some help with a kitchen incident gone awry. What happened?

MARGIE: What happened is – it’s sort of like a barbecue gone bad inside my house.

TOM: OK.

MARGIE: I had some deer meat in a big pot on the stove. It was – it had a cover on it. And it – I stepped out for a while and I came back and there was smoke everywhere in my house. And we opened everything; we opened all the windows and doors and all of that. And what I need is to find out how to get rid of the smoke smell. It is just disgusting; it’s terrible.

And I – we’ve done what we can. I’m washing – my poor washing machine is going nuts. I just wash, wash, wash everything. And we Febrezed on the furniture and – but my wood furniture I don’t know what to do about my walls and my painted woodwork. Because the day that it happened, I washed up the floor with vinegar and water. But it seems like the longer it goes, that it’s getting harder on the surfaces that it’s touched. And I just need some help to figure out how to clean it up, especially on the wood furniture, the walls and the painted woodwork.

TOM: Well, on the furniture, on the woodwork, Murphy’s Oil Soap would be a good choice. That’s a mild solution that smells pleasant and it’s designed specifically to clean wood surfaces.

However, I suspect that the source of most of the smell is going to be in – because of materials that are harder to clean, like fabrics, rugs, couches, upholstery, the pillows, that sort of thing. And for those, you really need to have a professional company come in and clean them. There are companies like – I think ServiceMaster specializes in fire-and-smoke cleaning and water cleanup. And they have the right equipment with the right types of chemicals to take the odors out of those sorts of things. What you can do is clean those hard surfaces on your own.

As far as the walls are concerned, I would mix up a fairly weak TSP solution – trisodium phosphate. You can pick that up in the painting section of any hardware store or home center and wash the walls down with that. OK?

MARGIE: Yes. Thank you so very, very much. I really appreciate it.