9 Clever Ways to Make Your Home Smell Great
How to Keep Your Home Smelling Beautiful and Pristine Fresh
Homes LOOK and SMELL. We all admire beautiful interiors, but when people enter your place and their first impression hurts their noses, you have room for improvement. Literally. Possibly all rooms.
Here are our tips how to give your abode a great fresh fragrance.
1. Shop Consistently: Buy Cleaning and Deodorising Products in One Type of Smell
Before you start removing odours, equip yourself with a range of cleaning and deodorising products. It is very helpful to have them all from one group of fragrances. It will be easier for you to achieve a consistently good result if you stick to one type of fragrance. Also, if you mix fragrances, you risk getting random and unwanted results. Sticking to one category will give you quick and predictable results.
Categories of fragrances to make your house smell beautiful
- Lavender – the universal classic. Result: FRESH and CLEAN, MASCULINE
- Orange – my absolute favourite. FRESH and ENERGISING, UNIVERSAL
- Fresh Soap – the smell of CLEAN, UNIVERSAL. Like the classic Dove soap. This type of fragrance comes under a range of names: Fresh Linen, Ocean Breeze (not sure why, as ocean breeze usually stinks with algae), Clean Smell etc.
- Rose – ROMANTIC, FEMININE, TRADITIONAL
- Frangipani – EXOTIC, FEMININE
- Eucalyptus – FRESH. Products containing eucalyptus oil are particularly effective for cleaning. Eucalyptus oil excellently removes many types of stains. It is also added to washing clothes.
2. Remove the Main Suspects
First step is to clean and protect the items that produce smell. Kitchen and bathrooms are the leading sources of bad odours.
Greasy Oven, Kitchen Cabinets, Extractor Fan or Rangehood, and Exhaust Grills in Your Walls
Grease smells, and the smell gets worse with time. Fat also attracts and binds dust, dirt and food particles, thus producing even worse odours. Over the time, even thin layers of kitchen fat and its friends attach themselves to these kitchen items, some more than others,
Deep-clean your oven, fan/rangehood, and exhaust vents in walls. Use cleaning products in your favourite fragrance range. I always clean my kitchen with products with orange oils.
Wash your kitchen cabinets inside out. At this stage, I always wipe clean the items in my pantry and in the cabinets. What would be the point of cleaning the cabinets if their contents remain dusty and smelly? Give them a quick wipe, your kitchen will love you for it.
Wash Walls, Ceilings and Light Pendants
If your walls and ceilings are covered with washable paint, give them a quick wipe. Again, use the beautifully smelling cleaning product of your choice as per manufacturer’s recommendations.
Wipe lamps and chandeliers, always maintaining safety rules. Wipe any panelling or tiled areas. Try to wipe as many surfaces as possible. This way you will minimise spreading of smelly dirt particles from one room to another.
Beware WET CLOTHS: Kitchen and Other Cleaning Cloths and Mops
Now that you have done all hard work removing dirt, grease and dust form your home, don’t let your assistants spoil the result. Wet cloths, including all these wonderful microfibre cloths, will play a dirty trick on you if you don’t sort them out. I mean OUT. Wash them and let them dry OUTSIDE.
3. Fabrics Keep Smells
The more fabrics you have in your rooms, the more things to pay attention to while tackling the problem of your house not smelling as great as it should.
On the other hand, these same fabrics will be your great allies in maintaining lovely new fresh smell once the hard work is done.
Carpets
Curtains
Cushions
Rug, runner
Fabric sofas
Fabric chair and armchair upholstery
Carpets and rugs require professional steam cleaning. Particularly if you have a dog or a cat in your house, their smell body odours will be rubbed against your carpets and rugs. This needs to be removed as per standard carpet cleaning procedures.
Wash your curtains, cushion covers and other soft fabrics using perfumed washing detergent and, if you like, fabric softener.
When you buy a fabric sofa, consider models with washable covers. These will give you easy maintenance of your sofa, as well as beautiful smell after each washing.
For the same reason, if possible, use removable and washable covers for your chairs and armchairs.
I sometimes get a custom-tailored additional cover for my armchair or sofa. If I find a sofa that I love the comfort and functionality of, I buy it and I invite my dressmaker to make a top layer, removable and washable cover in my dream fabric.
4. Pet Bed
Pet love comes with a few guaranteed price tags attached. You may not find it obvious, but dog, cat, rabbit, rat or mouse bed spreads most unwanted smells round your house. Wash it and clean it regularly, with hot water and unscented cleaning products. While washing, give them an extra rinse, to ensure the detergents have been removed well. Please remember pets usually have the sense of smell much stronger than humans, and what to us smells like a pleasant fragrance, to them is overpowering.
5. Scented Candles and Tealights
Now we come to the fun part of maintaining beautiful fragrance of your house.
Scented candles and tealights are your best buddies in that matter. You can burn them quite regularly, their warm glow combined with your favourite scent will give you a heart-warming feel.
Also, keeping scented candles not lit improves the fragrance of your house. I particularly like buying a large bag of tealights and leaving them around the house, in cupboards and draws, and on top of high cabinets – out of sight but still working for me.
6. Scented Sachets for Bedrooms and Wardrobes
For bedrooms, linen cabinets and wardrobes, I recommend using scented sachets. They maintain their natural aroma for many weeks. Some combinations of scents, particularly containing lavender, also are believed to aid good sleep and relaxation.
7. Perfumes, Body Sprays and Deodorants
Here’s a smart trick for you: consider applying your favourite perfume on yourself not standing in your bathroom, but in your living room. Particles of your ultra-expensive personal fragrance product will fall on your carpet, sofa, and other furniture. They will give your room a beautiful aroma – and a lasting one, as quality perfumes tend to outlast other fragrance products.
8. Close That Kitchen Door
If your kitchen has doors, try to keep it closed while cooking meals of heavy aromas. Cooking, and especially frying, is the main contributor of unpleasant lingering smells in everyone’s house, attaching themselves to furniture in every room, slowly, but steadily. This is how unpleasant lasting smells overtake people’s homes.
If you, like most of us these days, have an open-plan kitchen and living area, remember to close other doors, such as leading to hallways or bedrooms. Only open them after heavy smells have gone out.
While cooking, use the extractor fan and, if possible (and not offending to your neighbours), keep your kitchen window open.
9. House Ventilation and Air Filters
Regularly invite fresh air inside. It helps remove heavy lingering odours of cooking an even the most delicious dinner. Open windows and doors, let fresh air circulate round your house. This is assuming the air on the outside of where you live is fresher and cleaner than inside.
If this is not the case, consider buying for your home portable air filters and purifiers of tested and proven quality.
Beware Spray Air Fresheners
Spray Air Fresheners, particularly the automated ones, may be top-of mind solutions to tackling bad lingering smells in your house. However, a number of them seem to cause allergies. Not sure if this is caused by the mechanism of spraying, the ingredients of the freshener, or the combination of both, in a number of cases I have noticed respiratory allergies and skin allergic reactions to regular exposure to the automatic puffs from them. If you, and people around you, don’t seem to have any problem with them – great! They are easy to use and readily available. But if you notice allergic reactions, you may need to resort to the solutions above.
Happy Decorating,
Xena
