Remodel Questions – Contractor

I am in the process of gutting a few repo condos that have some human stench in them. Smoke, food, human, etc.

Once I have it back to the studs, do you guys ever spray the building down with a solution?

What is the solution?

Does it work?

Scott

Scott,
All of the rehabs I have done that had substantial stench from smoke, etc. were striped to studs and then just sprayed with Kills or a similar sealing primer.. It realy does a great job of removing the smell… I know there are some other soultions that can be sprayed, but they were not cost effective for us.

We used to run an ozonator for a couple of days, close it up and let it run, worked really good. I don’t even know where you would even start to look for one now days?

If your stripping down to the studs, you shouldn’t have a problem unless insulation has been saturated (urine…) The rock absorbs and holds a lot of the odors you want to get rid of.

Rw

If you gut to the studs it should be fine unless you have a mold issue. never ahd a problem once carpet and drywall is out.

I have previously looked into the Ozone generators online.
The cost is around $400, but you need to look at the ratings for output of ozone for room air as many times the units are specified for output using pure oxygen. The Ozone levels required are very high to oxidize mold or kill odors, so the unit must have some kind of timer mechanism and a means for flushing the residual ozone so that you are not exposed to the high concentration levels.

My interest was to kill the odors associated with the wet basement and mold growth. During the initial effort to clean this up, I had removed the lower 2′ of sheet rock to get to areas that I felt the musty smell was coming from and used a bleach (1:10)chlorine solution to spray these areas, thinking this would suffice to kill any mildew smell. I followed that with a summer of airing out the basement, thinking that simply allowing fresh air into the closed basement would reduce the odor over time. No luck…

In the end, I put a new front porch on the house and added a back concrete patio together with adding gutters and drainage for moisture reduction. This dried out the basement but didn’t kill the odors, even with a dehumidifier running. So, in the end, we stripped out the basement. That solved it. Just need to get all the crap out and replace it with new.

After insuring the outside would drain properly away from the house, then I put a closed cell foam insulation as a good moisture barrier and finished off the interior. I can’t get over how much simply removing the old materials solves the general problem as these retain the musty smell. Much better than attempting to retain the contaminated materials to save a buck.

With regard to the ozone generators, I spoke to a friend that worked in the smoke clean up business for a few years. One of the key things that he mentioned was that high concentrations of ozone over time breaks down rubber and I believe the plastics that cover house wiring, etc. You will need to look further into this if you are looking at the ozone generators.