That is the ceiling of our utility room. That ceiling was discolored from smoking. It was once as white as the word painted on it. If in the future, I am looking to buy a house and I walk into a home where they smoked inside... I am immediately turning around and leaving. The only exception is that it would be so cheap that I could hire someone to prime the whole thing, lay new flooring and clean the ductwork. Even as we cleaned and replaced and painted things, our clothes would still smell like smoke at the end of the day.
There are still moments when it smells like smoke, despite how much we have done. It doens't smell when you first walk in, which is a milestone in itself, but stuff hanging in our closet has a slight odor. As we continue living here, I will be investing in a lot of febreeze to keep things smelling fresh. Smoke absolutely gets eveywhere. Though the pictures here are the worst of the worst, every wall throughout the entire house had yellowed from smoke.
Even places that seemed to be white were in fact some dusty shade of brown-yellow. Even the upstairs closets were off-color. And we are certain that everything started as white, even though that seems unbelieveable. We took the utility closet doors off to do the flooring and realized that it was the worst room of all. Upstairs, the walls above the vents had discoloration which was from smoke emerging from the duct work. The blower fan had been replaced, obviously because every vent inside and outside of the furnace and duct work was covered in dust to the point that it was practically clogged. The duct work guys seemed a little amazed, and cleaning dirty duct work is all they do.
When we went to wipe down the cabinets we were convinced that we were taking off the finish because the rags were so dirty. We were not. The orange-brown that wiped off was not from the golden honey cabinets; it was the left over reside from smoking. To imagine that people could once smoke inside any public building is incredible and disgusting. Everything about this has been disgusting.
