Good To Know: Off-Gassing Vintage Furniture
Before we get started—hi, I’m Emily Bade, the Director of Marketing here at W Design Collective. I’m usually behind the scenes working on our website and most of our blog posts. However, today I want to share my personal experience restoring a piece of vintage furniture I recently purchased.
This is essentially a follow-up to our off-gassing blog post, which covers the airborne release of chemicals from any piece of furniture. While the off-gassing process for new furniture is very different than for vintage furniture, the tips in this blog post can help you speed up the off-gassing process for your vintage pieces.
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Days before quarantine started, and before we had any idea of what was coming, I bought a beautiful Mid-Century Modern dresser from an antique shop in Salt Lake City. I love MCM design, and I had a perfect spot in mind for this gorgeous piece. After borrowing my partner’s parents’ minivan, loading all six feet of it behind the front seats, and barely sliding it on its side through my apartment’s doorway—I should have known that this piece would give me trouble.
We thought that getting it home was the end of the road, and that we had cleared the biggest hurdles, but this was really just the beginning. A few weeks into owning it, all of my clothing stored inside the dresser started to smell like cigarette smoke. I had inspected the dresser when I first bought it, but hadn’t realized that it had been in the home of a smoker at some point. After a few days of panic, I started to do research.
So, while everyone was learning how to make sourdough starter, my quarantine project had become cleaning and deodorizing this beautiful piece. Here’s how I got cigarette smoke out of my furniture, along with my not-so-successful attempts along the way. I’ll also talk through some other tips for restoring and reviving vintage furniture to hopefully help you troubleshoot your own vintage purchases.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK
After discovering the smell, I emptied out the dresser and washed everything, but left the empty drawers inside the dresser. The first piece of advice that I read was to put some baking soda inside of the drawers, and leave it for a week. I put a paper bowl of baking soda in each of the drawers and waited. When the smell hadn’t changed after a week, I added a second bowl of baking soda to each drawer (I really wanted this step to work!). When that still hadn’t changed the smell after a few weeks, I poured even more baking soda on the floor of each of the drawers.
Plain baking soda was not doing the job, and the cigarette smell was as potent as ever, so I went back to Google.
The second piece of advice I read was to spray the furniture with vinegar, and wipe it down before the moisture caused any spotting. This also did not do anything for the smell, and really just added the sharp smell of vinegar on top of the cigarette smoke.
WHAT DID WORK
After a few failed experiments, I decided to do a lot more research. I had originally gone with the very first suggestions on Google, but now I was diving deeper into more niche sites. The first, from a woodworking website, suggested that the two most important factors when airing out furniture are time and airflow. They said that ideally, you could leave a piece of furniture in a dry outdoor place or a clean garage for up to six months to let it air out naturally.
Since I live in an apartment, that was not an option. Instead, I decided to take the drawers out the dresser, and space them out in my office. That way, air could flow between all of the parts of the dresser more easily. To help with airflow, I kept a fan pointed at the dresser at all times, and kept the windows open as much as possible.
This actually helped me realize one of the most important parts of this process—pinpointing the origin of the smell. Once I had separated the drawers from the rest of the dresser, I realized that the drawers were not the source of the smell at all. The wood was fine, but the cigarette smoke had permeated the particle board between each level of drawers and also along the back. I now knew where to target the rest of my efforts.
This is also when I resorted to specialty soaps. One website suggested a combination of Murphy’s Oil Soap, and a citrus based cleanser (I chose this one). The Murphy’s Oil Soap is only meant to be used for finished surfaces, and I tested it on a small corner on a side of the dresser, to make sure that the soap didn’t strip the finish. Once I knew that it was safe to use, I scrubbed it into the exterior of the dresser.
Even though it appeared very clean, I was surprised that a good amount of grime came off. I don’t know how much this has directly affected the cigarette issue, but it definitely never hurts to have cleaner furniture. Afterwards, I diluted the citrus soap and used it on both the interior and exterior of the dresser. I paid extra attention to the particle board, and afterwards my pile of used paper towels absolutely stank with cigarette smoke. We were getting somewhere!
After giving the furniture a few days to dry, I decided to do a test. I put one of the drawers back in with one shirt inside, and then obsessively pulled that shirt out about 10 times a day to smell it. It took more than two weeks for the shirt to start smelling like cigarettes again, and the smell of the dresser itself had noticeably improved.
I decided to do another round of the citrus cleanser, again focusing heavily on the particle board areas of the dresser. This time, the paper towels did not smell nearly as strong, so I think multiple rounds of the citrus based cleanser is definitely the way to go.
One thing that I’ve also added to my process is the addition of odor absorbing gel, to help speed up the off-gassing as much as possible. I have put one of these packets in each of the drawers, to help catch any additional odors. I expect I’ll also need to top off the interior with the citrus cleanser every few months.
This may seem like a lot of work, and it has certainly been inconvenient to not have a dresser for the past few months. However, once this is all over, I’m going to have a beautiful piece of Mid-Century Modern furniture that I expect to have forever, so all of the hassle is truly worth it.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS TO REMEMBER:
Plan on giving the piece plenty of time and airflow to let it off-gas naturally. If you do have a covered space outside, plan on using that for this period. As we talked about in our larger off-gassing blog post, a lot of off-gassing happens naturally over time.
Conduct thorough research and don’t be afraid of trial and error. Everything that has been mentioned here is my personal process, so what has worked for me might not work for you. Even though the baking soda trick didn’t work for me, I would still try it, as a lot of people have had success with it—and it’s one of the cheapest and most accessible options. Don’t be afraid to keep trying new things until you find what works for you. Also, remember to be careful with any liquid on unfinished wood, and test any new soaps on a small unseen corner of your furniture before you apply them globally.
Try to pinpoint the problem. This helps you know where to focus your efforts, and can also help you do more specific research. This cleaning process became much more manageable, as I learned to focus on the particle board instead of the entire dresser.
Be patient! This is not a problem that is going to be fixed in a few days or even a week. Any vintage furniture smell, whether it’s must or cigarettes or something else, took a long time to seep into your furniture, so it’ll take some time to get it out. Look for small signs of progress, and know that this is going to be a slow process. Luckily, it’s not anything that you’ll need to work on every day—I’ve worked on this once every week or so for the last few months. It’s definitely something that can fall on the back burner when more pressing matters come up. After all, time to air out is helpful, so even if you ignore it for a few weeks you’re actually still making progress.
Other Tips for troubleshooting vintage furniture
The process that I went through with my dresser would have looked very different if I needed any refinishing work. If you need to refinish your piece, we recommend following the steps listed in this article to identify the finish you’re trying to strip, and how to remedy it.
Don’t be afraid of pieces that seem to be falling apart. As long as the wood isn’t cracked and the joints are in good shape, you should be able to rehabilitate pretty much anything, even if it seems to be in bad shape. The details and construction of the piece itself are more important than the state that you find them in.
If your vintage piece is needing to be re-upholstered, we recommend that you have that process done by an upholstery shop. There are a lot of DIY guides to upholstery, but as we talked about in our custom upholstery blog post, upholstery can get really complicated and is often best left to professionals.
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