Home DIY

Cheers.

No the photo is after I've switched all individual kitchen switches off, Kitchen RCD on, then each individual one in turn and stopping at the cooker.

Annoyingly it's actually incredibly hard to put a fuse in an empty hole as it's supprisingly deep and falls to the bottom and not contacting the top clips. Think I'll leave it and grab a replacement tomorrow.

one by one

I guess the oven won't come on till it's on so I'll do that tomorrow. Once I've replaced the fuse panel(?).

Really not what I needed tonight. But at least the fridge, freezer and outdoor freezer are on.

I'm after a switched fused spur with a 13a fuse right?

Yes. Watch out for model with a hole for a wire in the front, which you don't want.

If it blew the fuse and tripped the RCD but not the circuit breaker it's probably a Live-to-Earth fault which is the kind of thing a failing heating element does, possibly intermittently as it heats up.

Aghhh... the oven is quite old but I replaced the element not that long ago. But fuck taking the oven outside to replace another one this time of year!

Thanks! I was under the impression that double insulated shades were typically all plastic, where this has a large metal shade (it's an "homage"to a Flos Smithfield ceiling lamp) - so assumed, probably incorrectly, that it would need an earth. It has a plastic fitting for 3 x bulbs, I'll try to take a photo this eve.

Some background: we bought a wreck of a house 2 years ago, it needed a lot of work as nothing had been done since it was built in 1966: no kitchen, central heating, shower, asbestos floor tiles, the worst of which was the previous owner was a chain-smoking agoraphobic so the house was very yellow, and very smelly.

We have done almost everything we could to mitigate the stench but have one remaining issue which is a small cupboard above the stairs that the hot water tank lived in. The tank is out, holes in the wall filled, repainted with stain blocker paint and new white wall paint, I replaced the wooden floor of it with sealed ply and siliconed the gaps to the void below too but it STILL smells! Has had some sort of bicarbonate / air purifier in for many months too.

Any ideas? Repaint the whole thing again with something super strong?

Vanilla essence in the paint?

I don't know if stale fags with a hint of vanilla is more or less appealing...

What "super strong" thing did you have in mind?

Giant Haystacks?

I dunno, I was putting it out there and hoped someone may have a specific product they have used in a similar situation.

I only ask because you either need to neutralise or mask the odour of the stale fags... and neutralising hasn't worked so far.

We had a similar predicament in our old flat for a few months which, when I tell you it was "self-inflicted" by the simple mistake of burning nigella seeds once, means I know that neutralisation simply isn't enough sometimes. We used the air purifiers but also went through a lot of scented candles and air "fresheners" to deal with the problem. Every time we came in from work, it was like walking into an Indian restaurant kitchen. I love Indian food, but it was too much!

So many years of cigarette smoke... yeh you might need to pull out all of the stops and try a few things.

If we weren't selling up, we would have redecorated the kitchen and added something to the paint to mask any remaining odour from the plasterboard.

Have you definitely cleaned it enough?

You don't want to paint over smoke.

We had to do a few washes of walls with sugar soap and bleach and bicarb all the windows

Yes, we had to do every surface of the entire house, including other cupboards and enclosed areas, this is the one remaining spot.

Sounds like you have few options left other than actually ripping all the affected surfaces physically out. Plaster off back to brick, chop out any affected timber, basically anything that the old fag smoke would have come into contact with.

You could take up smoking?

I bought a smoker's house. Nothing much to it other than LOTS of scrubbing and LOTS of painting. Sanding floors and scraping/hoovering ANY old dust or crud I could find, getting rid of ANY soft furnishings, carpets and underlay is critical. Even then, it took a good year or so for the smell to be essentially replaced with our own. Second photo is mid first scrub. The tar water was running down my arms.

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The smell in the room where that second photo was taken was so bad that my asthmatic wife couldn't go in there until it was sorted. I did a heavy sand of the floor and attacked the PVC windows with neat vinegar (replaced the handles too). Even then, it took a few coats of BIN and then 20 LITRES of trade matt vinyl emulsion to make the walls white again.

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Fin

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Fucking hell, that was grim. But you did an amazing job.

We looked at a house like that before we had kids.

Always assumed it would be a back to brick situation to get rid of the smell.

Edit: I'm impressed at how clean you got it.

I assume this wouldn't work, but I recently bought a carpet from a reclamation place at a car boot sale that I didn't realise until we got it home smelt like it had been in a smokers house for the last 50 years. This stuff killed the smell immediately https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/neutradol-fresh-pink-science-carpet-deodorizer-350g . Perhaps you could try making a paste with it and painting that on? For £1 it's gotta be worth a go

Yup, all soft stuff removed, all ceilings cleaned, and then plastered, all wallpaper and lining paper removed, all wooden floors sanded and sealed, all skirting boards sanded back and painted or replaced, all doors sanded and repainted. As I say it is just this one small cupboard that has retained the smell, the rest of the house is fine, I'm not sure what we did differently but here we are.

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As it’s a cupboard, maybe there’s a hidden space somewhere?

It's where the dead person now lives and she's still chuffing on embassy number one

Does the cupboard have a door? It could be holding the smell because it doesn't have airflow like the rest of the room.