How to Make a Room Stop Smelling Like Smoke

If you’re a smoker, there’s a good chance that you have a favorite room in your home in which to light up. That’s all well and good, but the drawback is that the room can start to smell pretty ripe once you’ve been smoking in it for a while – especially of the room happens to be a small space like a bedroom or home office. 

Are you getting ready to sell your home? If so, you’ll want to get the maximum possible price for it. If you’re not selling the home, it’s possible that your spouse has asked you to do something about the room that you’ve turned into an ashtray. Maybe you actually want to get the smoke smell out of the room because you’ve recently quit and are tired of smelling the constant reminder of your tar-stained past. Whatever the reason, you’ll find the advice you need here. 

Professional smoke remediation isn’t cheap – and what the professionals don’t want you to know is that you can actually do the work yourself at a much lower cost. Do you want to get the smoke smell out of a room? Here’s how to do it the easy and inexpensive way.

If you want a room to stop smelling like smoke, the most important thing that you can do is stop smoking in that room forever. If you’re a tobacco smoker, either switch to vaping or go outside when you want to have a cigarette. If you’re an herbal aficionado, grab a good vape pen from a company like Rokin Vapes and use that instead. Vaping has little to no odor, and it won’t leave a characteristic smell in the room where you do it. Remember that all the cleaning in the world won’t make a difference in getting the smoke smell out of a room if you simply go back to doing the thing that caused the smell in the first place.

If you want to get the smoke smell out of a room, one of the best things that you can do is increase the room’s airflow. If the room has windows on different sides, that’s ideal – just open the windows and let the breeze do the work. If the room doesn’t have cross ventilation, you can still improve the airflow as long as the room has at least one window. Use two box fans. Place one in the door and point it toward the interior of the room. Put the other fan in the window and point it outside. One fan will act as an intake, and the other will act as an exhaust to force a large volume of air through the room. This step on its own can make an enormous difference in the way the room smells.

Once you’ve taken measures to increase the airflow in the smoky room, the next step is to clean the room itself. Start by removing all of the soft items from the room. Depending on the room that you’re trying to clean, these may include things like blankets, sheets, throw rugs and curtains. If you can afford to replace those items, you should do it because it’s very difficult to remove the smell of smoke from things that are absorbent. If you can’t replace the items, launder them with a generous amount of baking soda, which can help to draw the odor-causing compounds out. After that’s done, launder the items again with white vinegar, which helps to break down the compounds that cause the smoky smell.

While you’re busy washing the soft items from your smoky room, you can get to work on cleaning the room itself. Here’s how to do it.

• If the room is carpeted, sprinkle baking soda liberally on the floor and vacuum it up the following day. If the carpet still smells like smoke, rent a commercial carpet cleaner from your local supermarket and use that.

• Clean hard surfaces with warm water, mild detergent and white vinegar. You can use this cleaning method for things like hard floors, walls and ceilings along with desks, dressers and most other types of hard furniture.

• Clean the insides of the windows using a window cleaner containing ammonia. Smoke will collect on every surface in the room – even the windows. You’ll be surprised by how yellow your cleaning cloth is when you’re finished.

In many rooms, there will be a few spaces that aren’t easy to clean with rags and detergent. Depending on the room, those spaces might include areas like desk or dresser drawers and high closet shelves. If you have tight spaces that you can’t clean thoroughly, you can draw the smoke smell out by sprinkling baking soda liberally around those areas and vacuuming it away after a few weeks. If the areas still smell smoky, grab some bags of activated charcoal from your local home improvement store and put them in those spaces for a month or two. As air travels through the bags, the odor-causing molecules stick to the charcoal and are trapped there.

When you’ve done everything that you can to clean the room, the final step is to maintain it while also removing the last traces of the unwanted odor. You can do that by buying an air filter and running it nonstop for a few months or as long as you care to use it. An air filter is essentially a large box with several filter stages inside it. A fan forces the air through the filter stages while also circulating it throughout the room. A good air filter typically has three stages: a prefilter stage that traps coarse dust and hair, an activated charcoal stage that traps odor-causing molecules and a HEPA stage that traps pollen and other microscopic allergens. A high-quality air filter will typically cost hundreds of dollars, but it’ll make a noticeable difference in the way the room smells.