"Art Todesco" wrote in message
et...
We are looking for a new house. In the last few days we found a real nice
log home that fits our needs almost perfectly with the one exception of a
fairly strong smoking smell. I thought that if we make an offer, it would
be accompanied by a complete list of "cleaning", such as all carpets
extraction
or steam cleaned, all walls, ceilings and floors, all doors and woodwork.
And
all fabric cleaned. My question is, are we kidding ourselves? Can the
smell be
eliminated? Any ideas if this can be accomplished successfully? BTW,
several
walls are wood (the inside of the logs). Also, how about the insides of
the
HVAC ducts and system?
Any personal experience with this?
Thanks.

Yes, you can get rid of the "fairly strong smoking smell" -- hotels and
convention centers do it regularly and effectively. If it were me, I'd use
the odor removal problem as a method of negotiating down the price, rather
than getting the current owner to do the cleaning work, for a lot of
reasons -- among them, the current owner is not goping to be sensitive to
the problem, will look for the least expensive way out, etc., plus since the
odor strength is subjective, I don't know how you'd write a contract that
stipulates the odor has to be removed before closing. The person that has
to be satisfied with the results should be the one paying the bill.

I'd try for either a price reduction, or a rebate ($2K? $5K?) to you to have
the work done. I would also spend some time with the manager of a 4 or 5
star hotel and get the specifics on what they do to remove smoke odors from
their rooms (either meeeting rooms or no-smoking rooms that have been used
by smokers.) As others have suggested, also contact a cleaning company such
as Servpro that handles clean-up after fires. You may want to hire them to
do the smoke smell removal. Regards --