Removing Cigarette Smoke Odor From Couches

It works great and is safe round the kids because it is environmentally friendly.

Smoke is one of the hardest smells to eliminate. After my chain-smoking in-laws left, I tried a few things, but I found this odor eliminator that worked really well that was recommended to me by my neighbor. It works great and is safe around the kids because it is environmentally friendly. You can find it at http://www.biocidesystems.com/roomshocker1.html

There is NO easy way to remove cigarette odor from upholstery! There are many home remedies out there, but they do NOT work very well! You will end up spending money with NO result! You need to have your furniture steam cleaned by a professional carpet cleaner. This really is the only thing that works very well! Your upholstery acts like a sponge for the cigarette smoke. It must be extracted! If not, you can only cover up the smell fo some time. Hope this helps.

I did try fuming the chest of drawers the photos were in. It also smelled very badly of moth balls. I used small plastic dishes with a paper towel soaked in bleach and put one in each drawer. I went back to the house two weeks later and it is much better.

Thanks, I'll try that on a few and see. I can scan the originals or photograph them, but I get a headache just looking at them.

The Mothball oder is Naphthalene, a cyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, and that would explain why baking soda would not be working. In industry to remove it they would kelate the Naphthalene with a chlorine based cleaner, however this would almost certainly wreak the photos. Perhaps leaving some bleach in a container were it can fumigate the photos? Just don't allow a direct contact or it will wreck the photos. Regarding the cigarette smoke the sodium bicarbonate treatment sounds like it should work.
Good luck

I would agree with the previous posters about baking soda. I bet if you sprinkled baking soda on the cushions & sealed them in a plastic bag for a few hours, then vacuumed it out, it would help a lot. Maybe add a couple of drops of perfume or essential oil to the baking soda as well. Good luck! That stinks (pardon the pun)!

We've been removing cigarette smoke from things from my mother-in-laws house lately. Washable things do best with the Febreze odor remover for laundry. For any other smell I use Out (a pet odor remover). My brother is removing the smoke smell from the couch with his ozone machine. It's a professional machine used by people who clean up after fires, etc. If the do it yourself stuff fails I'd get someone with an ozone machine to do the job.

I've been using baking soda to try to remove the odor from the family photos she had stored with moth balls. It's not working so well.

Would baking soda work? I use baking soda to pull out a bad urine odor out of my carpet when we moved into this house. I had to do it several times, but sprinkle it (dry) over the area. Let it sit for an hour, then vacuum.

It was inexpensive and it worked!