If you’re about to move into a house that was previously owned by heavy smokers, you might want to think about cleaning the walls. As a viral TikTok video shows us, they can get pretty gross over time.
This couple shows how dirty their house walls are.
Emily and Luke, a wife and husband who run the TikTok account homeonocean._ decided that the walls in their apartment needed cleaning, since they’d been covered in residue from cigarette smoke from a previous owner. They also decided to take us along for the ride, documenting the cleaning in a video.
And wow, does it ever get gross.
“The walls have been stained with nicotine from many years of smoking inside, and you can even see the outline of the picture frames on the wall which I think shows just how bad it really is,” Emily says in a voiceover on the TikTok.
They just needed the right tools.
Emily continues to explain that they consulted experts who told them to clean the walls with a solution called sugar soap.
They had to clean each wall multiple times.
Because the walls were so dirty, they had to clean each one more than once.
“We cleaned every wall about three or four times each to make sure that we got out as much of the nicotine as we could,” Emily continues to explain.
The walls were just so dirty.
“You can see how brown and dirty it is when we’re cleaning,” Emily continues. And yeah, that’s pretty nasty. It must’ve taken them so long to get these walls clean!
They remembered to get the ceiling, too.
“Here’s my husband cleaning the ceilings as well. We made sure we did them too because we know a lot of nicotine would’ve seeped in there,” Emily narrates. You can really see the difference between where Luke started cleaning the ceilings, and where it’s still dirty.
The grossest part of the video is when Emily shows how dirty their soapy water got.
This dirt, as Emily explains, is just from one small part of the wall! They probably dumped way more of these buckets of dirty water, too.
They managed to get out so much nicotine!
Their walls may not look perfect, but the transformation is undeniable. This is so much better than how it looked beforehand. Hard work really does pay off!
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And of course, they sealed the walls.
The next step is to paint the walls, but before they do that they have to seal them.
“And now that we’ve cleaned all the walls, we will seal them with a high quality blocker to make sure that any of the leftover stain doesn’t seep through, and the walls will stay beautiful and white.”
The video generated a lot of buzz
Plenty of people flooded the comment section, talking about just how gross the walls were before the couple cleaned them, and applauding all their hard work.
“Wow. [That’s] gross. And a lot of work. Good old Sugar Soap. Well done!” says one comment.
Some people even shared their own experiences.
“Nicotine is awful to remove! My last rental had it seeping through the paint [because] the painters didn’t clean or put a blocker on before painting,” another commenter wrote.
What a wild ride! Be sure to check out the whole video.
h/t The Sun