There are plenty of reasons that your home may have the smell of smoke or some kind of burnt odor permeating through. It can be as simple as leaving an item on the stove too long, burning something while cooking, a fireplace in the home, or someone smoking.
Whatever the cause may be, the smell is rarely a pleasant one. There are a number of ways to get the burnt smell out of your house. First, you can remove curtains and drapes, followed by sprinkling your upholstery with baking soda.
Also, you’ll want to clean your walls and improve the overall scent with an air purifier. Finally, consider cleaning surfaces and improving the overall airflow in your home.
Let’s explore each method in detail.
How To Get Burnt Smells Out Of Your House
Step 1: Take Down Curtains and Drapes
One of the biggest issues when it comes to that smoke or burnt smell in your home is that it can embed itself in fabrics. In kitchens, there is more than likely a set of drapes or curtains hanging in a nearby window.
If you have a strong smell of smoke or burnt odors in your home, you’ll need to take down all of the drapes and curtains first. Launder them in some cool water and use 2 cups of laundry detergent and white vinegar to properly saturate them. This should help to eliminate that burnt odor that becomes trapped within the fabrics.
Step 2: Carpeting and Upholstery
With the curtains and drapes being handled, you will need to sprinkle some baking soda quite liberally into any upholstery or carpeting. If the kitchen is close to a living area that has carpeting, you may need to address that area with baking soda.
Let the baking soda sit on those surfaces for at least a few hours; overnight is probably better to ensure that the baking soda saturates all of those odors out of the surfaces in question. When it has had ample time to work, vacuum up the baking soda from your carpet as well as the upholstery.
Step 3: The Walls
Yes, burnt odors can even become engrained in the walls if they are strong enough. When those odors are in your home, it is about cleaning every single area that may be impacted. When it comes to the walls, mix equal parts white vinegar and water in a bucket.
Get a sponge and saturate it in your mixture; make sure to wring out any of the excess liquid as that can create quite a mess when you start scrubbing. Then, wash down the walls using the vinegar mixture to remove any of the odors that may have become trapped in the materials or paint of the wall.
Step 4: De-Stinking the Air in the Home
This is actually a two-step operation, but the first will require the aforementioned white vinegar. Fill up several small bowls with white vinegar, placing them throughout your home in the areas that are most greatly impacted.
The white vinegar should help to absorb some of the burnt odors out of the air. Allow them to sit there for a few hours to properly combat the smokey or burnt odors that you may be smelling. The stronger the area is with that burnt smell, the longer you will want to leave the white vinegar there to soak it up.
Step 5: Implementing a More Pleasant Scent
Now that the white vinegar and baking soda have largely done the job of soaking in the unpleasant smells, it is time to fill your home with better scents that can help to mask the remaining burnt smell, pushing it away for good.
Start by cutting up a couple of lemons into several manageable slices. Fill up a pot with some water and add in your lemon slices, allowing the mixture to come to a boil over the stove. If you don’t want to go with lemon, you can put cinnamon sticks or cloves in the bottom of the pan and allow it to simmer.
By heating up the mixture, the smells from those items will drift throughout the home, removing the burnt smell and replacing it with something more pleasant and fragrant. What you use is up to you; different people enjoy different smells.
Using all of these steps in tandem, you should be able to get that burnt odor out of just about any surface in your home. It isn’t easy, but you’ll be grateful when you don’t have to smell that burning odor anymore.
More Tricks for Removing That Burnt Smell
The above step-by-step guide is for the worst of situations where that burnt odor has become engrained in your home. Unless you are careless, not paying attention, or the source of the smell is so strong that there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you’re not likely to be dealing with something that bad.
Thankfully, there are a lot of steps that you can take to remove more intermediate sources of burnt odor from your home. Some are easier and more effective than others; it is up to you to find the one that works best for your needs.
Take Out Burnt Food
The most common cause of burning odors is due to burnt or overcooked food. Cooking accidents are normal, and they generally aren’t a big deal. Even in some of the worst cases, it results in ruined food, charred pans, and an odor that fills the kitchen.
And the thing to keep in mind is that smell will stay around so long as you keep the source of the smell in your kitchen. In order to get rid of that burnt smell, start by removing the food from the house entirely. Don’t just throw it in the garbage, take the garbage out, too.
Scrub down any pans or cooking utensils that were in close contact with the burnt foods as well. Those odors can become trapped in the cookware and then disperse throughout the home. Most of all, do not put any burnt food down the garbage disposal. Unless you empty the disposal on a regular basis, the smell will simply sit down there and permeate the kitchen over time.
Create Airflow
So long as the smell hasn’t ingratiated itself into the walls, the carpet, and the fabrics around your home, you can generally get rid of it with proper airflow. One of the quickest ways to get that burnt smell out of your kitchen is by popping open a couple of windows.
Creating a cross breeze is even more effective. Open up the windows in your kitchen and any windows that can create that cross breeze effect. If there aren’t any other windows in the area, use a fan to blow the odors outdoors. If you have a door connected to the kitchen, open that up as well.
The more openings that you have in the kitchen, the stronger the breeze will be and the more effective job it will do of getting rid of that burnt odor.
Clean Your Surfaces
If you think that the burnt odor in your kitchen is particularly strong, it might be good to exercise some preventative cleaning. For some, that smell of burning can be particularly bothersome, resulting in the need for a deeper cleaning.
Start off by wiping down the cupboards, appliances, and counters using a standard cleaning solution. It is probably a good idea to wash the floors and the windows as well since these smells can infiltrate just about anything in short order.
Go with a citrus-based cleaner in most cases. Not only are these cleaners effective at eliminating those strong smells, but they can provide a natural citrus smell that can make your home smell better while cutting through grime and smoke as well.
Implement an Air Purifier
If you don’t have an air purifier in your home, it may be a worthwhile investment. Not only can a purifier help to eliminate those strong, troublesome odors, but it can help to remove allergens, pollutants, and germs from the air. This will create a better-smelling, cleaner air quality than ever before.
Just make sure that whatever air purifier that you choose comes with a HEPA filter and an Activated Carbon filter. The Activated Carbon filter works to get rid of the odors in the air while the HEPA filter removes both large and small contaminants that can impact your respiratory health.