San Ysidro
Oftenly cited as the world's busiest land crossing, San Ysidro is a community in San Diego. This gorgeous neighborhood is immediately north of the U.S.-Mexico border, which makes it a busy place! Living somewhere that busy and interesting, things can get a little out of hand with your home.
This owner was a big fan of having candles lit at all times, and unfortunately that can create a large amount of smoke. The smoke damage on this home was incredible. Candle smoke can be particularly tricky to clean because of the wax in the candles. It makes the smoke slightly water resistant, which can make it much harder to clean.
To start we removed all the furniture and belongings from the home. We then took out anything and everything that was left in the house. Once we had done that, we started scrubbing. We used many different types of cleaners and tools to clean this house. Our progress was very slow as it was difficult to clean the candle smoke off of all of the walls and floors.
If you are wondering what we were cleaning, the most simple answer would be everything. We scrubbed walls, floors, wood cabinets, bathrooms, stairs, doors, and shelves. In the beginning we tried using rags to clean, and it worked enough. But the rags we used were ruined after cleaning and we just didn’t have enough. That’s when we moved on to power tools. These worked very well. We also used a couple of other tools to clean the tall structures. We still used rags, but now we had some other things to use as well.
We also removed the wood feature wall in their home, and cleaned the fireplace. We noticed that there were smoke webs covering the walls and ceiling, which is a sign of long term smoke damage. Unlike ordinary spider webs, these can be a pain to clean up and remove.
