r/interestingasfuck • u/Plus_Leopard9367 • 6h ago
What happens to walls after smoking inside a house for over 75 years
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u/sambeau 5h ago
The whole world looked like this when I was a kid.
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u/CaersethVarax 1h ago
Remember when you thought that brown-yellow paint was just standard for pubs everywhere? Yeah...
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u/BGF007 6h ago
My grandmother and grandfather both smoked heavily. I still remember when they died, the smell was in everything. Doorframes, window frames, wallpapers, wooden floor, electric switches. Luckily, I needed to do the electric wiring from scratch so I just removed everything to the bricks and started from fresh. But for years, I still sometimes thought I could smell a hint when I passed certain areas that had not been fully decontaminated.
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u/Minute_Zombie_424 6h ago
This house has way more space than the human lung. Imagine what it does to such a small space in comparison.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Fill205 6h ago
Not by as much as I expected. Google is telling me lungs have a surface area of around 70 square meters, or around 700 square feet in American.
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u/Aware58 6h ago
So they never changed the position of some furniture for 75 years?
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u/Professional-Job7238 5h ago
Doesn't take 75 years to turn walls nasty like this, 5 years would do plenty and old people don't tend to move their furniture and decorations around much, lol
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u/Darbisha 6h ago
Amateurs. I could get that done in 2 years
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u/Gobbledok 5h ago
Was gunna say, it doesn't take that long. Bought a house where the front room was given an additional external entry and the internal entry walled up to create a granny flat. Well granny didn't die when she was supposed to and they sold. I had to gut the room, zinzer the brickwork and mop the tiled floor a dozen times with bleach to get rid of the smell. They were only there a few years.
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u/Dennyisthepisslord 6h ago
My mum used to smoke inside. Until the last redecorating and she could see how disgusting it was.
She still smokes though. Absolutely moronic
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u/AdorableExchange9746 3h ago
Quitting nicotine is extremely difficult. The cravings are unbelievable. Nothing moronic about it
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u/Ex-maven 5h ago
The fun part comes when the new owners try to paint those walls and ceilings.
That stain penetrates the existing wall surface and will bleed back through the new paint over time if you do not prep it well
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u/Sasiches_and_mash 5h ago
For any of you poor sods that need to repaint/clean a house like this you might want to get a wallpaper steam remover and use a mix white vinegar, baking soda and water, once that's done get an ozone machine (around £60 or £70) and leave it on a couple of hours per room.
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u/egomotiv 6h ago
75 years lol, my first apartment was worse. After 3 years. Those people barely smoked
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u/Available_Sector5594 1h ago
Legend has it, guests are still getting second hand smoke to this day.
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u/9447044 6h ago
Ive seen houses lose over 150k because of cigarette smell.
One house had a sell 'as is' because of it. All you need is months of airing it out, 30 gallons of KILZ and an imagination that you can smell it anymore
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u/Mediocre_Sprinkles 4h ago
My in laws just sold their house way under what it should have been worth. I'm wondering if this was the reason.
They liked to smoke by the back door, inside with it closed. Or blow smoke towards the unlit fireplace from the middle of the room like it was a vacuum sucking all the smoke out.
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u/Jackalodeath 2h ago
If you're personally in this line of work, I highly recommend you invest in a commercial ozone generator or two.
A good one will run you a pretty penny up front, but if you're losing ~$150k on a property for foul odors like that - smoke or otherwise - a 1%-3% investment is well worth it.
You'll still need to have the walls/surfaces properly cleaned before you O3 it, but once that's done, about a day with one of those sealed in each room will shred that and many other stanks into oblivion. An hour or two to air out after the Ozing and you'll be amazed how well they work.
I won't go into too much detail, but I work with this sorta stuff - and much worse - several times a year. In a nutshell its equipment rental, stuff like large, modular walk-in coolers/freezers, display cases (think the freezer and seafood sections at Costco and whathaveyou), other appliances; for everything from sports events and trade shows, to supermarkets and hospitals.
We deal with everything from smoke to rot, left in our units at least once or twice a quarter; and no matter the chems we use, you can't get that week-long, baked-in stank out of the hard foam insulation.
So we have Ozzy; a $4 grand medical grade arc ozone generator to do it for us; both before we clean and after.
Before is just so we can breathe while we clean out the schmutz left in em without puking ourselves inside out; after to make it smell like brand new/"fresh linen"/Spectaculoso, depending on the use-case.
We even have a smaller O3 unit for the work and box trucks. Those smells will stick to everything - especially upholstery - and some of our field crew can't be arsed to stop en route to satisfy their nicotine habit.-_-
Largest unit we have is a 12' x 56' freezer that's been through Hell. That's only 672ft2 so we only need Ozzy for a couple days, tops; but I promise you, with some preemptive cleaning and a good O3 source, it can save you a lot of money in the future.
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u/-mudflaps- 6h ago
I've cleaned up a house like this in the late 90s, you have to wash the walls with soap and the ceiling too, it's a horrible job that takes forever
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u/twister-uk 5h ago
But deeply satisfying to see the true colours start to come through patch by patch - it's like the room is a.giant scratch card just begging to be revealed.
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u/Kimikohiei 5h ago
My aunts’ white kitchen walls look like cola exploded on them. Literally brown, drip-like stains.
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u/discomuffin 5h ago
Why is there no reflection of the camera person in the mirror?
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u/ABoiledIcepack 5h ago
It really does look like a mirror but it’s a doorway to the next room
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u/discomuffin 4h ago
Holy shit, you’re right! I was really questioning myself for a moment 😅
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u/ABoiledIcepack 4h ago
I had to look SO closely to figure it out haha. Nearly thought this was ai if bro's reflection didn’t exist
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u/Yorbayuul81 4h ago
At that point do you clean the walls, paint over them, or both?
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u/Kildaredaxter 2h ago
You have to WET sand it a bit. not dry sanding so you don't inhale the dust. then wash with vinegar/water, once dry Prime it with 2 layers of Kills primer/paint.
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u/1986silverback 3h ago
Your telling they have not washed the walls in 75 years ...I do mine at least every 2 years
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u/Queasy_Barnacle1306 2h ago
I cleaned and remodeled a house like this during the recession. It was awful, the smell was everywhere, and the demarcation lines between things that had been hanging on the walls for years were much more pronounced.
The higher you went up the wall, the worse it got, and the part that grossed me out the most was just how sticky that tar(?) residue was.
The owners had passed and the new buyer was turning it into a rental.
Never again.
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u/FlattenInnerTube 1h ago
House next door was occupied by two smokers - 3 packs a day each. Lung cancer killed her, he moved out shortly thereafter. When the house was for sale, and I had my windows open, I could smell that house. It was foul. Smoking damage took 40% off the price of the house when it finally sold. New buyers ended up pulling out the sheetrock in a couple of rooms, it was so bad.
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u/natronmooretron 1h ago
So gross. So glad I quit. Went cold turkey in 2020. The thing smokers don't like to discuss or think about is that their addiction to nicotine controls every second of their life. Every aspect. My number one question to myself (when I wasn't smoking) was, "When is my next cigarette and how am I going to get away from nonsmokers to smoke it. Nicotine addiction alienates you. It makes you poor. It makes your car, your home, and your clothes smell like shit. Oh yeah, it also kills you. I only say this because maybe one person who still smokes might actually read this and think about quitting for a few seconds. Carry on.
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u/murph3062 1h ago
So just in case you didn’t know, if you don’t have time to paint all the walls, you can actually get your paint tinted the same colour as grandma‘s nicotine walls.
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u/Meewelyne 5h ago
This is normal, you don't need a smoker to make it happen. Wall refreshing exists for this reason.
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u/Fly_Boy_1999 5h ago
My high school used to have a smoking lounge for the upper classmen (prep school) in the dormitory. I found photos of students in there on various old yearbooks. That room progressively went from white to yellow to almost complete brown.
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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 4h ago
And that's why you paint your walls off-white. Like that's what, Gardenia?
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u/_Frostration_ 4h ago
This can be easily achieved in less than 2 years, especially in humid regions.
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u/Rachel_Silver 4h ago
My mom only took about 10 years to get to that point. She always burned candles when she smoked, believing that they "cleaned the air". They just added more smoke to stick to the walls.
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u/Will_TheMagicTrees 4h ago
“You can see the arms of Christ in the Palmal smoke” is my new favorite sentence
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u/dvdmaven 3h ago
We bought a property that has a tiny ADU. The son of the former owner lived there, chain smoking, 15 years. This is about what the walls looked like after "professional" cleaning. Ripped out the carpet and padding. A second cleaning followed by two coats of 123 sealer on the walls and ceiling, finally got the stink under control.
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u/william538 2h ago edited 2h ago
Dad smoked Pall Mall non filters. When he died I had the house painted. 3 to 5 coats of primer (depending on which room) plus a coat of latex paint on top.
He never spent a night in the hospital until a heart attack at age 75 and the terminal lung cancer was diathermy next day.
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u/Emergency-Seat4852 2h ago
Aside from the discoloration it makes the gypsum extremely brittle as well. Working as an electrician, if you work in a house like this, it’s nearly impossible to get clean cuts for outlet installations.
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u/Upstairs_Fig_3551 2h ago
I worked renovation in some apartments that were cinder block and concrete. After the contractor shut down the HVAC, humidity would condense on the ceiling and rain down great brown drops of nicotine-saturated water.
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u/DenticlesOfTomb 2h ago
When years later, nicotine bleeds through after cleaning with TSP, a coat of oil Killz, and 2 coats of paint, you know it's some nasty shit.
Source: the last two houses we bought
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u/Little_Creme_5932 2h ago
Back in the days before indoor smoking was banned, I worked for a cleaning service. Literally 10-20 percent of our work (in multiple buildings) was cleaning up after smokers. Smoke, ashes, cigarette butts etc. Then when smoking was being banned, smokers would say "it's our right to smoke inside". Really? It's your right to have everybody spend huge amounts of money to clean up after you? (Of course, the costs of smoking are even greater in other ways).
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u/Rockobrocko42 2h ago
A friend bought a house that use to belong to 3 chain smokers all 3 died of lung cancer (what a surprise) we had to spray water to scrape the old acoustic ceilings and brown sludge slid down the walls turns out all the trim, cabinets and ceilings were white not tan.
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u/briank3387 1h ago
I shudder to think what the walls in my mother's house would look like if they emptied out the house. At least they're wallpapered and not painted a light color like in the vid, so it's not as obvious just looking at them.
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u/MongerNoLonger 1h ago
Heck, my dorm room looked like that after nine months (never smoked inside again after that, and luckily was able to eventually quit)
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u/ludoludoludo 1h ago
Very first visit a few years ago when we started to look around to purchase our first home was a home similar to that but worse, the walls were actually brown. The realtor kind of warned us right before getting inside. It was horrible lmao and a shame because the place looked really nice besides that.
It was purchased and basically completely redone / stripped to the frame and rebuilt. That's how bad the smoke damage was.
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u/Liqour_Mortis 1h ago
And that’s just from off gassing. Imagine was it does when applied directly to your lungs.
I guess the writing is actually on the wall.
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u/bransiladams 1h ago
My parents did this to our walls within the span of a decade, growing up.Amazed they’re still kicking
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u/Horror_Ad9899 24m ago
yes. if u smoke inside u should clean walls and paint them after some years so it looks good
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u/Traditional-Bike7825 6h ago
On the bright side if you have kids that like those toys you fling around and stick to windows... Now any toy they have can stick to the walls!
Have a poster you want to put up? Just slap it on the wall lol
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u/mxforest 6h ago
I am not experienced with western housing. But don't people get paint redone after every 5 yrs or so?
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u/Eis_ber 6h ago
Not everyone can afford a painter, or they only paint certain rooms.
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u/mxforest 6h ago
It's not even that hard to paint it yourself. Now it is starting to make sense why American homes look like 20th century homes in movies. They really do be living with 20+ yr paint job.
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u/International-Pass22 6h ago
Yeah, it's like a two day job. And half of that is just waiting for the first coat to dry
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u/PopSwayzee 3h ago
I think you’re missing a lot of factors. My dad hasn’t repainted his house in a long time, but he’s almost 80 and has to limit physical activity due to heart issues. I suppose it’s not even that hard for him though 🤷🏾♂️/s
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u/Relative-Panda-747 6h ago
Yeah, I guess every interior that wasnt painted in 75 years could look like that.
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u/KarmaSilencesYou 6h ago
Hey, there are people that paint their walls that color so at least you save some money. And look at it this way there’s now an barrier for insects and pests…they don’t want to be near that stuff!
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u/Medical_Amount3007 6h ago
Looks more like it has gotten paint a couple of times. My grand parents would
Look like this after a couple
Of years of my grandfathers smoking.
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u/Such_Reference_8186 6h ago
I was going to say the same thing. It's been cleaned at least 2 times...but it permeates the drywall. The ceilings are usually the worst
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u/MLBnewestFan 6h ago
I don't really think it has much to do with smoking but simply not cleaning the house lol. I don't smoke at all but I am quite lazy so my home have places that look like this too because I don't clean them enough or at all, there are molds and stuff.
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u/ConditionObjective43 6h ago
Something tells me they were not an avid smokers though. Because my unc has managed to make his freshly renovated kitchen brown, not this light yellow like in the vid, but chocolate BROWN in a span of just 2 years. He smoked 2 packs a day.