I could smell the old, stale, cigarette smoke when I first walked in. I was getting my first look at the house I decided to purchase. The yellowed curtain rods told me that smokers lived there for a long time. It turned out that the fifty-year-old home was owned by only one family, and from what my neighbors tell me, they were heavy smokers. But the price was right, and I figured I’d be able to deal with the stale smell and make it livable again.

Thankfully, all of the walls and ceilings were painted before the house went on the market. After I moved in, I got to work on cleaning the woodwork. I started with the hardwood floors. Once over with Murphy’s Oil Soap, then rinse. I could not believe that it took five, sometimes six rinses until the water would not be brown when I dumped it out.

Next I wanted to put up blinds in my bedroom. Might as well wipe down the windows, and window frames before I do. Again, five or six passes before the years and years of smoke residue would stop turning the sponge brown. I’ve gone over five windows since (with still more to go). Every time I clean some woodwork here I am just astonished by the amount of brown residue that’s there. It even has kind of a sticky feel to it. How could someone live in this house that long and not notice it?

This weekend I decided to attack a closet, including the closet doors and frame. Even though I know what to expect, I still can’t believe how much of the stuff is on there, and how long it takes to remove it. “I’ve got to document this,” I thought.

The wet paper towel pictured above was rubbed over the closet door after the second pass of the sponge! Yes, that’s right. It picked up all that brown residue after the door had been wiped off twice.

I’ve cleaned about three-quarters of the woodwork in the house, and the good news is I don’t notice that musty, smoke smell any longer (except in one place). It probably helped that I got my new doors installed last week, complete with new jams and frames. I do smell stale smoke a bit in the kitchen, but since everything in there is getting ripped out and replaced in a few weeks, that problem will soon be a memory.

How to clean it

In case anyone with a similar problem comes across this post, here’s the best way I found of dealing with the problem:

Take a bucket with one part vinegar, and two to three parts water. Wipe down the dirty woodwork once with the vinegar solution, rinsing the sponge often. Dump the bucket and repeat (for a total of two or three times depending on how dirty things are). Then keep rinsing with water until the water stops turning brown.

Finally, a thought for you smokers out there. A thought that that pops into my head every time I clean that crap off of something. If smoking tobacco leaves all that residue on the woodwork, what do you think it’s doing to your lungs?