Tinker....I had a problem so bad that I had to remove all the HWF and subfloor on the first floor. Trust me, if you can smell it, even faintly, the animals will continue to use that spot. My house had a virtual Noah's Ark living here..you couldn't be in the house more than a few minutes before needing to leave. I had to remove the HWF and subfloor, had the basement beams professionally sandblasted, soaked with Kennel Odor Eliminator (KOE) by Thornell, then sealed with polyeurthene...and it did the trick. Not trying to scare the bejeezus out of you, but I learned that urine has ammonia salts that last long after the urine has dried...and every time it gets damp, the salts are reactivated. That's why it smells bad when it's humid. You might start with KOE in the carpet, but be prepared for it to also in the subfloor. So getting rid of the carpet and treating the floor is likely your long term solution. And trust me, although KOE is more expensive than what you can get at Home Depot or Pets R Us, it's what professional kennels use...and it was worth its weight in gold. Good luck! Jen

cmarlin - if we keep them, I'll clean them, but no paint, I think they look pretty rich and even though old, I actually like them. I think I'll probably put in something like Silestone in a mocha color and it would look great. What will determine whether we keep them is if I can find a good match that will appropriately fit. kelpermaid, I think they painted in the house recently, though I'm not sure - going to try and find out. I know they've lived there for 6 years, so if they are the only people who smoked there in the last 25 years since it was built, at least 19yrs of it had no smokers - but not sure how bad the last 6 years have been. creekside - now you've TOTALLY confused me! In some cases, homes need to dry to the interior. Kilz will prevent that. So will some other products. A spot of Kilz here and there won't hurt anything. Rolling it on all the interior walls may promote mold growth. So, if you are going to use Kilz after cleaning with TSP or something like it, you can't paint everything?? I'm sure I'm not understanding something here - I'll try to read the info on the link you sent - maybe call the co. next week. Carol_from_NY -thanks, I think my cleaning list is growing by leaps and bounds. The way I'm going, I may have to put my mother on the top of the car and tell her to hold on to the luggage rack for the trip up I'm going to have so many supplies to take! Thanks for mentioning the steamer, I have one and wouldn't have remember to think about taking it. I've never heard about putting gum in for smells, that's a new one. I'll try ANYTHING to get the house to normal. Thanks for all you suggested. Well, at this time we are in limbo. Inspections turned up a few problems, two problems that could be major, one that definitely is and has to do with a foundation failure. I am trying to get the owners to agree to fix what's on the repair list I sent them - which isn't everything that needs to be repaired, I took on the cheaper and more easily aspects of it. Will know more next week whether the deal goes through or falls apart. Wish me luck!! Thanks again to all - everyone has been extremely helpful, and it's all appreciated! Oh, one more thing - my Mom was there during the inspection and told me they had a machine running to take the stink out and she thought it smelled better in there - was probably an ozone machine. My nose will decide (if we close on it, that is) THANKS!!!!

I'm sorry. :( I didn't mean it as bragging, just noting such a different "normal". We don't have lilacs or tulips or all kinds of other things that want cold, and it gets too hot for some of my herbs, and they croak. We have avocados and citrus but no cherries or all those lovely big apples. And we have no water. None. We used to have water, but people planted almond trees where there wasn't enough water for them, so they're irrigating them with diversion water and exporting a huge amount of our water to foreign lands in the shape of snacking nuts. Sigh.

Well, a hood can be designed to do whatever you want it to do within the limits of physics (or more precisely, fluid dynamics). Removal of most of the grease particulate spectrum and any non-grease particles composing smoke, along with excess moisture, are primary functions of kitchen cooktop ventilation. In the process, all odors that are entrained in the rising and hopefully captured and contained effluent are also removed. Obviously, if an odor generator is removed from under the hood, or the hood is turned off, then odor is not captured and contained. The capture and containment process is aided by the uprising velocity of the cooking effluent and (where applicable) gas burner combustion products. A pile of room temperature cilantro on top of a cold cooktop will out-gas in all directions, and if either the air motion locally, or cilantro oil molecular propagation speed is higher than the hood air velocity at the cooktop surface (generally very low, even on full power) then one will smell cilantro throughout the kitchen. I might argue that is welcome, but other odors may not be so nice. For eshmh: My velocity values are derived from peak thermal plume velocities as described by "Thermal plumes of kitchen appliances: Cooking mode," Kosonen, Koskela, and Saarinen, in Elsevier B.V., Energy and Buildings, and attempt to account for the effect of baffles on moderating the blower air velocity averaged over the baffle space relative to the peak cooking plume velocity shown in this reference. A similar velocity approach is one of the sizing methods described by Greenheck in their document, available on-line, KVSApplDesign_catalog.pdf. Due to the necessity to capture and contain effluent from any burner when it impacts the baffles, even with the other burners off, the air velocity entering the baffles has to be high enough at any point under the baffles. Hence, we can design for one burner's peak plume velocity and achieve good capture and containment even if all burners are operating. However, the cooking plume velocity shape (measured transverse to "up") is rather like a peaked-up Gaussian function, and has significant width tails that may easily exceed the hood horizontal size at the hood height under some conditions. Capture of all the plume all of the time is unlikely with most space limited residential kitchen hoods. Conversely, the total plumes' mass rate of rise with all burners operating will be less than the total mass air flow through the baffles from the hood blower so long as the velocity of the hood air is high enough to preclude peak plume reflection off of the baffles and into the kitchen. This is because we designed the velocity to deal with the peak plume velocities which exist over only part of the zone into which the plume rises. If the hood velocity at the baffles is too low, then reflection occurs at the baffles, leading to effluent spillage, as shown below. (From CKV_Design_Guide_2_031504.pdf, (c) 2002 by the California Energy Commission.) kas