Buy house, smoker house, many wooden elements

Hello dear community.

I am about to buy a house. Everything basically fits but:

Unfortunately, it is a smoker’s house. What worries me here are mainly the wooden elements.

- All windows are wooden windows
- Some wooden beams run through the ground floor
- From the first floor upwards, the entire slope is made of wood. This extends all the way up to the studio.
- The staircase is open, meaning that even if smoking mostly took place in the living room, the smell has really spread into all rooms.
- The walls are only plastered and painted, so there is no wallpaper that can be removed

Do you have experience with whether the smell can ever be removed here? To be honest, I’m a bit afraid that the pollutants, especially when warm, will be released from the wood over the years.
Would sanding the wood help, or would one really have to install a new ceiling here?

Best regards

what does the broker or expert you certainly took with you say???

Hi,

the expert was not yet involved, it is scheduled for next week. The broker is not a standard for objectivity

Best regards

As always, remote diagnoses are hardly accurate. The actual possibilities for renovation can only be determined on-site and during the first visual inspection, and even then only as a hypothesis / concept. For predominantly closed, smooth surfaces, cleaning might possibly suffice. For rough, porous building materials, "encapsulation" might be possible, e.g., by plastering over, sealing, painting, etc. However, this rather superficial effort is only justified if the materials are generally of high quality. Otherwise, I would rather recommend a basic renovation and replacement of the components.

You should therefore definitely inspect the house a second time with an expert architect/civil engineer, who besides these issues also checks numerous other details: condition of preservation, general (energy-related) renovation effort, building damage, remodeling possibilities, construction and property law conditions, and who can of course also give an assessment on the demanded purchase price. The pitfalls of buying real estate are initially not visible to the non-expert interested party—and that is most people. The possibly nicely refurbished surface of the property ("sales varnish") may be deceptive at first glance. What is interesting, however, is what lies beneath and what emerges during subsequent renovation.

Nicotine and the other dirt probably penetrate deeply into masonry and wood. Ultimately, that means a complete renovation or controlled residential ventilation (with heat recovery). If you supply enough fresh air, the problem will reduce somewhat over the next 10 years.

Hi Che.guevara,

that sounds promising Seriously, do you have any personal experience here?