Removing Smoke From Our House

Recently I was cooking down some apple juice into apple syrup to use to test a recipe for Sweet Savvy. I needed to go out to an appointment and it wasn't quite finished cooking down. I needed the syrup to be done when I returned so I could test some cake recipes and take them to a meeting that night. So I asked Larry to watch the syrup and turn it off if it reached the correct consistency before I returned. He agreed and I went off to my appointment.

When I returned, I opened the door, and was hit in the face with a big billow of smoke. The kitchen was filled with smoke so thick, I couldn't see to walk through it.

It turned out that Larry had misunderstood my instructions and gone into another room at the other end of the house. The syrup had completely cooked away. The remnants were now smoking in the bottom of the pan. And because he was so far from the kitchen, the smoke hadn't yet reached his nose.

After turning off the burner and removing the pan, Larry opened all the doors and windows and turned on the hood fan. The smoke itself cleared fairly quickly, but we were left with a very strong odor of smoke throughout most of the house, especially in the kitchen and in my office right next door.

Then we set up a big fan in the window of my office to bring in fresh air so I could use my computer. I got on the internet right away to find out how we could get rid of this odor naturally.

Here's what we did to remove our smoke odor.

1. Ventilate, ventilate, ventilate. For several days after the smoke, we left the doors and windows open as much as we could with the heat and humidity, and ran all the fans we had to pull fresh air in and pull smokey air out. Fortunately, the weather was cool enough to leave the windows open all night.

2. Use an odor eliminator. I have a lot of products that I have tried for Debra's List . Larry said, "Don't you have a sample of something that will remove odors?" And I immediately thought of Approach Biological Odor Eliminator, which had worked so well on other odors when I tried it. Now was the real test. Since they advertise that it works to eliminate smoke odors, I pulled out my spray bottle and Larry started spraying it around. Within seconds, the smoke odor noticably lessened, and we continued to spray it around as needed over the next few days.

3. Clean the surfaces. Smoke is made up of gasses and particles that stick to surfaces. So to really eliminate a smoke odor, surfaces need to be cleaned. Fabrics may need to be washed. Larry used baking soda and water to clean the top of the stove, countertops and other hard surfaces, then put the burner grates in the self-cleaning oven. The following day he ran the self-cleaning oven while I went out to lunch. He then used Approach Biological Odor Eliminator to clean the walls in the kitchen (he learned from the internet not to use soap and water to clean smoke from walls because it pushes the odor into the wall instead of removing it).

4. Put out bowls of vinegar. We put out shallow soup bowls (more surface area) of distilled white vinegar to absorb the smoke odor and it did. We left them out for a couple of days, until it all evaporated away. This was very effective. I've also read that citrus peels and ground coffee will absorb smoke.

5. Use an effective air filter. We don't usually use an air filter in our house, but Larry found an inexpensive Oreck particulate filter at a garage sale and bought it to cut down on dust when we're working on remodeling projects. So we ran that filter. And we also changed the filter on our air conditioner. We use a very high efficiency filter on our air conditioning system, and I'm sure that had a lot to do with clearing the smoke throughout the house.

I think these steps would work if you had a small kitchen fire or someone smoked in your house. IF you had a fire throughout the house or are buying or renting a house where a smoker previously lived, there's more to do. Here are the website reseources we found that had helpful information:

* Ask Yahoo: How do you get the smell of cigarette smoke out of walls and fabric?

* University of Florida: Handling Smoke Damage After a Fire--Getting Soot and Smoke Out

* The Dollar Stretcher: Removing Smoke Odors and Stains (this one has directions for removing odors from a house formerly lived in by a smoker)