 Good afternoon. This is Aaron Brown out of San Antonio, Texas. I am a realtor. And I am super excited to be here with you guys today and share with you a little bit about craziest smells that we encounter. I've got the one and only Angela Brown over here. And Angela, tell us a little bit about you today. Well, thanks so much, Aaron, for having me on the show today. I'm super excited to be joining you guys. And for many of you that are joining us, you're joining us because there are nasty smells in your house and you wanna sell your house or something like that. I've been a professional house cleaner for the last 32 years and we've helped thousands of families either clean up their homes to get them ready to sell or we've just been in their homes when their houses smell really bad. And then we have to come to a moment of realization that if other people are gonna come through our homes, they're not nose blind like we are. Like we know our own laundry smells, we know the smell of our pets, we know the smell of our pantries. And we've given permission to ourselves to have certain smells in our homes. But the people that are coming into our homes to buy our homes do not like the smells that we have necessarily. And so is the answer to cover it up and just like make it smell good or do we get rid of those smells and how do we do that? So I was super excited to be a participant in today's conversation because smells that linger is a huge issue when it comes to the real estate market. Erin, share with us a little bit about what realtors are looking for in terms of when they come. Is it something that you prep them for or is it something that they just comments that they make on the side or how does that work? You know, we're walking into homes every day with clients and it's that first impression. So as soon as you open the door, whether it's an animal smell or a chemical smell, that's the first impression people get walking into your house. So it'll be fun to talk about it today. All right, so my question for you before I share anything with you yet, do you prefer that homeowners bake cookies or apple pie or they light candles or they spray the house down before you get there? What is your preference? It's ideal if the house can smell nice but not overpowering. And it's a really tough balance whether that's homemade cookies or a nice smell. People usually tend to overdo it or not do anything. And if you don't do anything that's really bad and if you overdo it, it's almost as bad. And so how, where's that fine balance of we've overdone it or we haven't done enough? The best balance is to walk in and not be aware of the smell. That would be the best balance for sure. So no smell, if possible. Either no smell or something that feels warming, like the smell of pumpkin or the smell of cookies, but it's so easy to overdo. I often recommend just if you can neutralize the smells in the house. It's better for everyone. That's a great tip. We've got a realtor on our staff at Savvy Cleaner and I was talking to her the other day because she had just shown a property over the weekend. And I said, so tell me about the smells because we're doing this show that we're having on Thursday. And the first thing she said, oh my goodness, you're not gonna believe we walked into a house the other day. As soon as we walked in, she's like, the smell just was overwhelming. And she said, my first thought was, oh, they're hiding something. And I said, no, that's horrible. And she said, there was so much smell like little plug-ins and air fresheners and all this stuff. She said, my first thought is they're hiding something that should have been addressed in the cleaning process. So if that's the message that buyers are getting, this is time for a great conversation. Day before yesterday, I walked into a home with a client and the smell was so bad in the living room that they walked out of the home without even going into the rest of the house. And we were done with the showing. Oh no. It was a chemical smell and the house had just been rehashed. And so brand new floors, countertops, the whole house was new inside. But the chemical smell was so strong of them trying to cover up the smell of smoke that they just walked right out and said, this isn't the house for us. We didn't make it through the living room. You're kidding. It was crazy. So happens every day. So if that's true, and I believe you when you say that, but if that's true, there are people that because of the smell of their home, they're losing the sale of their house. Yeah, this particular home had been on the market for a little over 30 days. And the smell was so strong, we literally couldn't tour it. A beautiful one-story home. But we literally didn't tour the home. We didn't make it through the living room. And then we were done. Oh. I wanna stop and say hi. I see so many of our friends here that have been with us on other shows. Hi, you guys, it's so good to see you today. We've got Melanie and Shuckit and we have Jillian. And you guys, it's just awesome to see you guys here. Thank you so much for joining us. As we jump in today, I've prepared a couple of slides for you. And these are based on years in the house cleaning industry. And when we get a call from a realtor that says, hey, we're either coming over to show a property or we have a move in, move out clean, there are certain smells that we have to address in order for those sales to go through. So I put together some really gross pictures. Okay, so this is a disclaimer. I wanna warn you guys, fair and advanced. If you have a sensitive stomach, this is not the show for you, please turn around and go away and watch the replay after you've had your dinner or something, but this is gross, okay? So I'm giving you a fair warning. What I wanna share with you right up front is that there are things that will trigger smells in your home. One of them as you're approaching the home is gonna be mildew or mold on the side of your property. Now this is vinyl siding. Vinyl siding is almost a plastic type material where it has pores in there that are, I don't know, it has like little areas where it can trap things like dirt and dust and leaves and whatever from the outdoor elements. So when you have humidity or you have great big tall trees that have overgrown the house and the sunlight can't get in and the air can't get in, it starts building up on the surface of your outside. As you approach the house that has a really pungent smell. So even before they get to the house, even before they've looked at your property and it might be immaculate on the inside. But if the outside of your property looks like this, the first thing that they're gonna think of is, oh, this house is neglected. If this house is neglected on the outside, what else are they hiding? So we wanna make sure that it doesn't look nasty as well as that it smells nice and pleasant. Now a couple of things that I want to pay attention to as we are talking about the mildew on the side of the house is the difference between mold and mildew. Mildew is kind of a two-dimensional, if you will. It looks like a powder, it looks like a film, it looks like a mold that's on the surface. Mold is actually more three-dimensional where it can like grow fur and it can kind of grow into a glob and it's more three-dimensional. So the difference between mold and mildew is that they're both organic, they both grow like wildfire and you don't want either of them in your home. But if you see traces of either of them in your home, it can produce this kind of a musty smell that you're, and it just makes you feel bad in your respiratory system, okay? It's very damaging to your health tab, either mold or mildew present. So the very first thing approaching your house that I wanna mention is that you have some kind of a spray. Now you can remove this on the outside of your property by having either a pressure washer, for example, and using a bleach combo. I wanna give you a couple of quick tips about that from the cleaning side. If you're gonna use something like bleach, a bleach is a sodium hypochloride and it has a very strong smell as well. But it can also kill plants and do damage if it is not used properly. So you wanna make sure before you use it that you water all of your plants really, really, really well because if any of it seeps off the side of your house while you're spraying it down, you wanna make sure as it eeks into the ground that it doesn't kill your grass and that it doesn't kill your plants and stuff like that. So water your grass, water your plants really well. Then you wanna get a great big drape or like a covering and you wanna cover your plants so that if there's any overspray from the pressure washing and it splashes off onto your bushes, that it doesn't harm your plants in any way. So hypochloride is fine as long as you're using it under these circumstances, okay? So you wanna just make sure that you're using it with care. So that's a pressure washer pressure wash it off the side of your house using a bleach spray. There's another product on the market. It's RMR86 and it's also a sodium hypochloride and some people prefer that to bleach but it's very similar in nature. You can also use chlorine from swimming pools. So it's gonna come down to a cost factor but they're all done and applied the same way. So if you're gonna use bleach there's a very specific way to do it. The next thing that I have to mention is that you use personal protective equipment when you're using bleach because bleach is very strong to the eyes. It's bad for the respiratory system if you just inhale it. So you wanna make sure that you are wearing an N95 mask and that you are wearing protective glasses as well. This will keep your face from breathing it in and then also protect your clothing because if any of it splashes on your clothing, boom, that outfit's gone, right? So you wanna make sure that you are careful when you use it but that is the way that I would recommend for the outside of your house. Erin, do you have any comments on that as we get started with our mold and mildew removal? I think you covered it but I did wanna say we've got a lot of questions coming in. So we appreciate the questions, keep them coming in and we'll be addressing a lot of these over the next few minutes. Do we have any questions so far on the bleach that we could address before we move on to a different topic? Now particularly, no, there was a couple of products that were also recommended for outdoor use that might help, so. What we will do is at the very end, I'll save a few minutes and we'll do a lightning round and then we'll go ahead and we'll answer all of those questions at the end as well. So save your questions for the end and if you have questions specific to what we're talking about, do jump in and one of the two of us will try to catch them. So awesome. The next thing that I want to highlight is a pet odor. Now this is really huge. We get this in a lot of homes, not just move out, move in, move out, not just home showings, but we get this in a lot of homes that we go into. The smell will knock you out and it can be from a litter box. It can be from protein throw up from an animal. It can be from urine that has been left behind or they've marked their territory. And so there are a lot of different things that you can use in order to remove those smells or neutralize them. In the professional cleaning industry, one of the products that we use is this product right here and this is a biostain and odor remover and it's made by Otoban and this is a professional series product. And I have linked everything below so that you guys can take a look at this. We buy this in the gallon container and you can buy it in a ready to use container which is just a spray. When you spray it, it neutralizes because it has organic enzymes in it. It neutralizes the protein that comes from the diets of your pets. So if your pet smells bad, it's possible that they have too much protein in their diet. So like if they're puking or if they leave urine on the carpet or the furniture, it's because they have too much protein in their diet. It can also give them bad breath. And so by spraying this on the furniture, this treats that and then it prevents the need for them to mark their territory again because they recognize that smell. So again, it's natural recurring enzyme eaters that will eat up those odors. So that's one of the products that we've used for years. And one of the things that I wanted to show you is that we have inside this, we use it from the gallon. This is a one ounce pump. And you'll see that it just right here will hold one ounce. And so when you're mixing up your chemicals, you don't need a lot. This one is not one that's diluted. This is a ready to use product, but we do use spray bottles like this. So if you're gonna take that and you're gonna put that inside a bottle like this, one of the things that I recommend is that you make sure that you label your bottle. This is an OSHA label. And I wanna show you these really quick. These just come in a roll. I've linked to these as well below because this is a clear product. And if it's in a just a jug, you're never gonna know what it is. People don't know if it's bleach. They don't know if it's a deodorizer. They don't know if it's an enzyme cleaner or whatever. So I want to make sure that you're always, always, always labeling your bottles. And that will keep anyone in your house from misusing chemicals. So anytime we use chemicals and we're gonna use a lot of chemicals in the odor removal process, we wanna make sure that we follow all of the OSHA regulations. Let me see if I can get up here close. This allows you to write the name of the product up here and then any of the hazards that go along with it. And then what personal protective equipment you need to use with this product. And so this allows you on every product that you use that you put inside a spray bottle that you've labeled it properly so that the next person that comes through whether it's in your home, it's you. It's a professional cleaner. If there's anyone else that might use the spray that you're protected from that. I like this bottle. I wanna highlight this real quick. I get asked this question a lot. What bottle do you use? And I like this particular bottle. This is a Zep bottle. I might have left links below. If I didn't, I will leave it, I will link it after we're done here. But this allows you to spray sideways. You can spray upside down depending on where you are like in a shower on the side of the, if you need to get underneath something this lets you spray at any angle. So I like this for this reason. I also like this bottle for the reason that if you use bleach, bleach does not spray through all containers because it can crystallize and it will get locked up in the process. This allows you to spray inside the container. So I do like that spray bottle for that reason. Jillian says, how can you make a house smell clean? Like essentially nothing. This is an excellent question. And we're gonna be talking about this in just a second but I like the fact that she brought this up because clean does not have a smell. Clean does not have a smell. And so like Erin said a few minutes ago when they go inside a home and they're hoping for a pleasant smell pleasant is different to every person. That's a subjective thing. Like what might smell good to me might smell totally gross to someone else. And so how do you know if the person that's coming through your home likes the way that you have your house smelling? But if it doesn't smell like anything and it's just a neutral, non-smelling house at least they can just come in and it's not part of the conversation. So I'm really glad that she brought that up. I have to say hi to Rachel Rose. Rachel Rose is from England and she always says hi to me and always makes me feel so important. I'm so glad you joined us today. She said, since I started using bicarbonate of soda just leaving it in some small open tub hidden I've noticed it really takes away the dog smells. I'm so glad you brought that up. And one of the things that we have that while we're on that topic and I'll show you this right now there are these little boxes of baking soda and this is sodium bicarbonate. This is what baking soda is made of and this is called fridge and freezer and this comes in a little pouch with a little door on it and you peel off the door on both sides of the box. And I do wanna point this out. It has a place right here to write the date. So this is good for 30 days once I open the little window. But what's cool about the little window and here's one with the door open is you can see that it's about three fourths of the way full. This is called flow through technology. So air comes in one side and it comes out the other side. And so what happens is you can hide these around your house like we hide them behind plants. We hide them in the room with the litter box. We hide them inside the bedrooms especially if you have like a teenager and they have like dirty sock smell in their house. There are all kinds of places you can hide these that are out of sight but not out of mind because they absorb the odors as the air flows through it. It removes that smell from the room. So this is a really great way to do that just as a deodorizer. There's another product that we use on the market that's a really great product and it's damp red. The difference between the two is the baking soda is just a deodorizer. It doesn't remove any moisture from the air whatsoever but this product is unique in that it does. And so as you're removing the moisture from the air let's say that you have a bathroom for example that doesn't have very good ventilation. What you can do is you can put this in there and as it absorbs the odors I'll show you this is kind of cool. It has a lid here where the air can get through it and then it has a little container here so that there are little beads in the top of it and as the beads dissolve it picks up moisture from the air and the moisture runs into the bottom of the cup and so it processes that as well and then this little container is reusable and so this is used and it's another one of those it's really great you put it inside a pantry you put it inside a bedroom like in a linen closet you put it on the top shelf of a closet we have the hanging versions that lots of people will use hanging in their closets especially if your home is on the market the hanging packet looks like this and it's decorative on the outside but it has a little handle on it and it can just go up inside your closet at the bottom is where all the water collects. So I'll get up here close so you can see this but these are like the little beads and they're kind of like little salt rocks and so what happens is this bag is breathable it's kind of like a Tyvek bag and it's breathable as it breathes in the air it dissolves these little beads and it fills up this pouch with water so what happens is it looks like this and you know that it's used up its stuff you see it like how it's just filled it now with water and now at the bottom it's filled with water and so this one is ready to throw away but if I get up here close you can see all these little things up here these are deodorizing beads that have now disintegrated so as they disintegrate it eats up all the rocks and it fills it up with water and then your house smells nice and clean so that's another way to do that but one of the biggest uses for those is we have like firemen using them inside the lockers at their work because they've got this break room and then they've got all their clothes that reek of fire and so they'll put those inside their lockers we have kids that put them inside their lockers at school so that all their gym equipment doesn't smell really bad when they go to the place the next day so they're really great for lockers for schools they're also really great for homes and for closets especially if you have people that are going to be coming through your house to show your house especially if you have teenagers that have dirty socks and you know that certain smell so sometimes people have said that they work really well in assisted living centers right so if you have elder parents that are living with you and there's a certain smell that's like a medicinal type of smell this is really great for that room as well and like I said it can just hang up in a closet it can be out of sight but not out of mind because it removes all the smell and the odor from that room so do you have a link for those Angela? I do those are really really great products and we have we have used those we have clients that use them whereby them well I've left links in everything below so that you guys can take a look at it and you can learn more because like I said we've used them a lot in the homes that we've worked with and the families that we've worked with because there's really no nice way to say well your son's bedroom stinks you know I mean you can't you can't say that but it's nice to say hey we have a couple of solutions that you guys may want to consider we put one in the bedroom we put one in the bathroom you know what I mean and then as you place them around the house if you're a professional service a professional cleaning service you just add those onto the bill of your your cleaning for that customer so the customer still absorbs the cost of it but now you've helped them out so that they don't lose that home sale because their house stunk and somebody didn't get past the living room right? yeah there's so many applications for those thank you for telling us about those yeah absolutely when we talk about smell one of the other smells that we have to stop and think about is cigarette smell and the smell of weed I know there are a lot of people that are experimenting and they're having fun and they're it's their home they can do whatever they want in it but at the last minute if you have a showing of the house we have to do something with that smell and that becomes a problem when the house just reeks and of course as a house cleaner we're dealing with other things we're dealing with the nicotine stains that are on the blinds and the windows and in the drapery and the fabrics and all that stuff but the thing that we have to consider is if you do smoke inside your house or if you vape or if you do weed or something like that the smells as strong as they are are going to be in the drapery and the fabrics and the the upholstery and the anything that where it can trap a smell I know a lot of people in the moving process have had to literally repaint and do like a paint sealer so that it will seal off that smell and they got to do the whole entire house and disinfect it and all that stuff to get rid of that smell so this the smoking in a perfect world no one would smoke inside their house but it's not a perfect world some people do and so one of the things that we do excuse me specifically for the cigarette smoke is we use an ozone generator and for those of you that are not familiar with an ozone generator I want to share a short little clip that I've prepared we use the ozone generator for a couple of things because if we come into a house the big issues that we're dealing with are going to be the mold the mildew the pet smells and the cigarette okay those are the big smells that we're going to deal with when we try to renovate a house and get it ready for a new home buyer and so I've got a short little clip that I want to show you guys and then we're going to discuss some of those products and then I'm going to also answer some of your questions about how it works and when to use it and that kind of stuff so let me see here how do you clean a shower with bleach well the answer is you don't do it very often but when you do you want to make sure you have all the personal protective equipment that you need and that you have a proper system in place and that once it's clean we're going to maintain it with just regular everyday cleaning chemicals and we don't need really strong cleaning chemicals most of the time but if you do have a shower like the one we're going to clean today we do need bleach and here is the process the first thing we're going to do is start with personal protective equipment I've got a bib apron on that covers all of my clothing to protect it from any spray we're going to be using a spray bottle from any spray getting on my clothing and then also my shoes so as part of our personal protective equipment we are going to wear shoe covers now we never wear shoe covers in the shower except when we're using bleach and that way it keeps it from getting on our shoes we're also going to wear a pair of gloves the gloves are going to keep any spray from getting on our hands and we are going to wear a face mask to protect us from breathing in any fumes now quick tip once you are ready to spray you're going to hold your breath while you're spraying when you have to take a breath dip out of the shower take room temperature breathing because it's an enclosed space and if you breathe in the fumes it will make your eyes red and it will be hard on your breathing okay so we are still going to wear a face mask but we're going to breathe outside the shower when we spray we're going to hold our breath inside the shower okay all right next thing is I have personal protective glasses that I'm going to wear this will keep any spray from getting inside my eyes all right so now that we are personally protected for climbing inside our shower before we do we're going to remove the bath mat if in the event we end up spraying anything on the floor and then we step out onto the bath mat it's going to ruin that bath mat so we want to make sure we remove the bath mat before we climb inside the shower now once the bath mat is removed I have two terry cloths and these terry cloths are folded in half I'm just going to lay one down right where I'm going to step out so my foot will step on one of these on each side as I climb outside the shower okay and I will have my shoe covers on but anything that touched the shoe covers I don't want to transfer that onto the floor and I don't want to transfer it onto the the customer's carpet or anywhere else in their house so as I step out of the shower if I have bleach on my feet I'm going to step on a terry cloth the shoe covers are going to come off I'm going to wipe off the bottoms of my shoes then we're going to be good to go all right the next thing I have is a great big old bath towel and you say what is the bath towel for? well we're going to use ozone for this project and this is an ozone generator right here the ozone has three oxygen atoms that are connected to it so it's a molecule of a light blue gas and ozone is also known as smog and so what's going to happen with this ozone generator is once we spray the bathroom down we're going to have a lot of fumes inside the bathroom so we're going to let ozone go into the air and create a pocket of ozone around my bathroom and then it's going to decompose all of the bleach smell and then once all the fumes and all the smells are gone then we're going to go back in and we're going to clean the bathroom okay so we're going to spray it first we're going to leave for about an hour and a half that's where this bath towel comes in so what I'm going to do in order to keep ozone and bleach fumes from circulating throughout the house we're going to turn off the air conditioning and we're going to turn off the heat and we're going to turn off the ventilation so we're just going to create a packet of ozone and bleach inside the bathroom all right here's where the bath mat comes in I don't want any person plant or pet inside my ozone chamber so I'm going to take my bath towel and I'm going to open it up and I'm going to roll it sideways and I'm going to plant it below the bottom of the door and that way when I close the bathroom doors and it's on the bottom of the door no ozone can escape and I'm going to turn the ozone machine on I'll leave links in the show notes to all this stuff so you guys can see what I'm talking about and you can also see the kind of ozone generator that I have this is perfect for a master bath it has a timer on it and I'm going to set the timer for 30 minutes so 30 minutes of ozone then once the ozone dies down I'm going to let it set for about an hour and that way all the ozone can disintegrate out of the air okay now for the bleach part we're going to climb inside the shower we're going to spray the bleach and this is just an empty bottle I've just got regular straight bleach the regular straight bleach goes inside the bottle we're not diluting it we're going to use it full strength okay the full strength is what's going to make your eyes turn red if for any reason you don't wear the glasses and you're inside breathing the fumes okay so this is the reason that we're going to do such personal protective equipment and then also our spray all right so once we have the spray we're going to spray the shower from top to bottom and we're going to let it just set we're not going to agitate it we're not going to scrub it we're not going to anything we're just going to spray the entire shower down okay there's a catch the only part of the shower that we're not going to spray is all of the hardware that's the faucet that's the faucet head and it's the rim around the glass because we don't want our bleach to eat all that up okay so no hardware and no chrome or no bronze or anything gets sprayed with the bleach we're going to come in after we're done and we're going to use a steamer for that now in chemical safety we know that we can't mix anything at all with bleach so we're not going to come in with another cleaner after we're done we're going to come in we're going to hose the whole shower down and we're going to be done with all the bleach once we're done with the bleach we're going to come in with the steamer this is just water okay tap water we're going to use on the shower itself now in order to clean the glass because we have not sprayed the glass with bleach what we're going to do is just use a steamer pad and we're going to use steam and we're going to clean the walls with the steamer pad then we're going to clean the grout with the steamer and you'll notice on the steamer there's a little tiny head it's very skinny that will fit with the grout and so with the grout we're just going to go up and down very lightly very easily with the steam and then we're going to go ahead and steam the rest of the walls down we're going to squeegee the wall down we're going to scrape all the water towards the center of the floor and we're going to be done with our shower So instead of it taking us hours to do, we're going to do this setup, which is going to take a couple of minutes. Then we're going to let the chemicals and the bleach do all its work. Then we're going to go clean the rest of the house. When we come back, everything will be nice and tidy, but we'll wash everything down and then we'll just do the steamer. Quick, quick steam up job and then we're going to be done with the project. And then we can go ahead and clean the regular bathroom. It's just a regular bathroom. So we still have the bathroom to do. But here's the secret. When you go to a customer's house, if you're a professional house cleaner, you're going to do this process at the very first of the job. That way you can be cleaning the rest of the house. Then when you come back, the bleach and the ozone will have already done its job. And then you can go ahead and clean the bathroom just as you would normally clean a bathroom. And the whole bathroom is not a deep clean project. How do you clean a shower? Whoa, I almost started that all over again, but I'm sure you guys got it the first time. Thanks for watching that with me. Do you guys have any questions? I just want to say really quickly, you've got an amazing tool set there that you just showed us. And definitely for all of us, it's worth getting. I know none of that is crazy expensive, but it's so nice to have the right tools for the job. What a difference. Even just cleaning the glass. Huge issue all the time. Every time we walk into a home, that glass is always so sunsy. It looks so gross. And if people just got the right tools, wow, what a difference that would make. Well, one of the things, and I'm glad you brought that up, Erin, because soap scum doesn't necessarily smell bad, but it looks bad. And so if something looks gross, a lot of people and then they assume that, okay, all of my senses are kicking in now. I hear it smelling, I smell it smelling, I see it smelling. So in the back of their mind, it's much worse than it actually is. So we want to remove all of that stuff, but we use the ozone generator a lot. And the ozone generator is small. I mean, it's this big. So it's about the size of my head, which is not very big at all. And it has ceramic plates in it. And this ceramic, I mean, this unit will go for about, I don't know what it is, almost like 250,000 hours or something. I forget what it is, but it'll go for a very long time before you have to replace the ceramic plates. And the ceramic plates can be replaced. So we've never replaced them. And all the years that we've been using these, we've never replaced them yet. And it still works. So the secret is, again, no plants, no people and no pets, right? It is not safe for tab ozone while they're around. So what we do is if you're going to be at home and we do this all the time, we make sure that we turn off the air conditioning unit because we don't want air circulating through the house. If there's ozone going in one of the rooms of the house, we also have vent covers that are magnetic vent covers that will smack over the vent so that no air escapes while we're doing the ozone process. That way, if there are pets in the house, if there are people in the house and you're cleaning the house, you don't run the risk of somebody woofing that in and then making their lungs or their respiratory system sad, right? So the ideal situation is to do it while somebody's on vacation or if the family's going to be out shopping or at the fair for the day or however they're going to spend the day, then the cleaning company can come in and they can do all that. And then it has the chance for the ozone to die down. But the ozone is fantastic for things like cooking. Cooking is a really tough topic for us because this is garlic. I couldn't find a picture to show you of curry, but there are some foods that smell so strong that are not a flavor or scent for everyone. Now, I know that Erin mentioned earlier that some people love the smell of certain things while other people don't. The smell of garlic is not a favorite smell of mine. I know that when I smell garlic, it kind of makes me gag and I take garlic every day. I take like odorless garlic capsules, but if I were to just eat raw garlic or if you're approaching the house and there's garlic smell, like lots of people where I live will plant garlic out in their yards and in their flower beds because it keeps the deer away and there are a lot of wild deer that come through and they eat up all the plants. And so they plant garlic in their house, in their yard, and then you approach the house and it's like, whoa, just knocks you out, right? So if you have one of these houses where, and I promise this has happened, you guys are going to know the smell, burnt popcorn. It's just got this nasty pungent smell to it, like, wow, what just happened or burnt pizza. The smell is so strong you have to open the windows because like there's a smog that comes through and you just can't breathe. You know what it means? This is nasty. And so the ozone works perfect for that, right? So you're going to make sure that, again, no pets, no people and no plants. So just to remind you of that. But the ozone machines, they're like 70 bucks or 100 bucks. You get the whole entire kit for less than 100 bucks. And for a professional cleaning service, we use that a lot. And if you are a family that uses lots of strong cooking smells and you're going to put your home on the market, this might be a great investment for you. I don't know if you can pick up one at a used marketplace, but even if you could, chances are it's got years left on it for the ceramic plates because people don't use them as much as it's not an everyday product. But as a professional cleaning service, we use them all the time. And also fire and flood restoration companies use them all the time to get rid of the smell of the mold and the mildew that you run into when you're talking about other areas of your home. This is poor ventilation. And the poor ventilation is something that I want us to take a look at as well because while this is not a smell, it brings in a smell. It's that leaky moist ventilation issue where you're going to get a mildewy type smell. It's kind of just a rank smell that doesn't really smell like anything in particular other than it smells like it's been raining outside. And again, this is very typical of homes that have overgrown with trees where there's not a lot of ventilation and the sun can't get through the house and it can't let the house air out. And a lot of times, the telltale signs as you're approaching a house, you'll see on the ridges of the windows, like the windows will have a little brick ridge to them. There will be moss and mold growing on those ridges, just because it's, again, there's nowhere for it to go. And so if you're approaching a house, even as professional house cleaners, if we approach a house, and I hate to say this, but if you approach a house and you see that there's mold on the outside on the windows, that suggests condensation on the windows on the inside, mold, mildew, we've got a whole bunch of stuff we got to deal with, your price just went up. And it's not that we're trying to rip people off, it's just that we have so much more maintenance and we got to bring in ozone machines and we got to bring in strong chemicals to try to then knock that out so that you do have a clean and sanitary house. Aaron, what's your take on this? Yeah, it's so, so true. Even just those little things, people walk in and they're like, oh, this is so gross. Oh, this costs so much money. In people's minds, a lot of those costs are so much bigger than they actually are. And just having those little details done, it makes all the difference. I have had clients ask me to take an extra 10 grand off the offer price, just for seeing things like that, because they have no idea what it will cost. They have no idea what kind of proves they will need or what kind of people, or if it's major or minor, they have no idea. They're just looking at it going, oh, that looks gross. Um, get us some more money, you know, so we don't have to pay as much as a seller. It's not that it costs so much money, but it does. By the time you bring in a remediation company and they bring in all the tools that they need in order to remove if mildew has turned into mold in your house, it's actually a sand blasting process where they've got these grapid machines where they bring in, it's like dry ice and they have to dry ice the mold off because otherwise it can't grow back. If they just bleach it down or something, yet it looks like it's gone, but it comes right back after a minute because they haven't removed the source of it. And so what happens when you call like a mitigator and they come out and they do a moisture test, they'll go up in your attic, they'll go down in your crawl space, and then they will test the moisture in all the different places and they will pinpoint exactly like they have these little heat meters where they will go inside a room of a house that will turn red or yellow depending on how much moisture is in the room. And then they'll say, okay, behind these walls, we've got mold behind these walls. And you're like, I don't see any mold. And then when they pop through the walls, because they'll do all this kind of stuff, because they've got to get to it in order to clean, you'll see the mold and you're like, oh my goodness, it almost ate through my walls, right? It's a serious thing. So when you start seeing this, it is into the tens of thousands of dollars. And I know even we were talking about the ozone machine, the ozone machine is not expensive. But the service that's going to come and going to do the ozone machines for you, they're very expensive. I know in the Airbnb industry, we get a lot of Airbnb cleans. If someone has been smoking, especially if they've been smoking weed, because that's a really strong smell, oftentimes it's like $500, extra just to remove that smell from the house. And that's like the average price. And so while you thought you stayed somewhere for the night for 69 bucks or something, it's now 569 for you because you smoked weed in their house, right? So it is very expensive. And again, the smells get trapped inside the fabrics and the drapery and the tapestries on the walls and oil paintings. I mean, it's tough to try to remove some of those smells. And so the smells that linger are those trapped smells that are not broken down with the ozone, which is one of the reasons we use the ozone machine because it actually eats up that extra molecule. So that's the reason why it's so expensive. But the ventilation is an issue that we need to look at and we need to seal all of the cracks and all of the leaks so we don't have that. All right, this is one that's not so fun. But many homes that we go into have just nasty, nasty, icky fish bowls. And while the fish might still be alive, there's the smell and it's not just a fish smell, but it's a fish plush plus ick smell, right? And so the fish bowls, and this is something the homeowner can do. You don't need a professional cleaning service for this. The homeowner can do this all on their own. But what we recommend is that you serve, save the life of your fish, put them in another unit and please, please, please clean out all that scum and all that build up that's on the inside of your fish container because if you have a fish bowl or a fish tank and it looks nasty like that, again, when homebuyers walk in and they see that, they smell something even if the smell is not that strong, right? They're looking at it and their mind says, oh gross. And so please, please, please keep the things that are like that clear. Sometimes you'll have a plant that's overwatered and the roots will rot and you're smelling this rotted smell and you don't know why. It's the same kind of a smell. It's like this just rotten smell and it doesn't really track back to anything. You're looking around the house like what, what, what is that smell? That's where these little tiny ventilation boxes come in. We've hidden these like in kitchens behind plants where a plant smells bad or near the garbage disposal or in other areas where they're common to have nasty smells, right? So if we can highlight those common areas and then try to avoid the smell altogether, then we're not dealing with something that's like this that a customer has to fight with us for because that's, that's awful. I have to stop for just a second and I have to say hello, Leslie Pool from Ontario, Canada. We've got Natasha here. She says, magnetic vent covers, taking notes. Yes, thank you very much. Robin in Virginia says, do you have a master list of professional cleaners across the US? I do not, but we're putting one together right now because we get the question 12 or 15 times a day. And so people that have gone through our program, people that are trained and certified by Savvy Cleaner, we're putting together a list right now so that those, we can recommend those to people. I'm a little lary to recommend people that I don't know personally that haven't been trained in the method that I recommend because I don't want to send them to you and then have them be totally different than what I promised, right? So it kind of puts me on the hook, but Virginia says, how long after this process would you wait before showing the house? Will there be a bleach odor? So the ozone, and that's an excellent question. The ozone is going to eat up the bleach odor, okay? So by putting the bleach, and this is cool because you can do this on the outside of your house. You can do it on fences. You can do it on that ridge where the brick is outside your windows. You can do it on the windows themselves on the window pane. Anywhere that you see mold, you can use bleach, but if you're going to use bleach, there's a very strong smell. That's where we use the ozone machine. The ozone is going to eat up the bleach smell, but the ozone leaves a smell of its own. So after all of those molecules have broken down and it's gone back to regular oxygen, then there's no smell at all. And so you have to wait for a couple of hours. So if I'm deep cleaning a house and I go into a house and there's just this awful, awful bathtub. And the reason I say bathtub is because if you have teenagers with long hair, or guys with long hair, oftentimes that will get washed down the drain and it clogs the drain and then stuff backs up inside the tub. And it's not that the hair smells bad, but the backup in the tub does. And when you shower or you take a bath and you have body proteins and suntan oil and hair dye, and you have soap and all that other stuff, sweat, everything that comes off your body and that tries to go down and that gets caught in the hair, that smells bad. Because that smells bad, and because that's where we are with the smell, we have to do other things to try to combat that. Now I want to share with you real quick, and I think I have a picture here. Because this is kind of gross, but hang on. This is a clogged sink. And this is common for a lot of the homes that we go in, where there has been hair that has gotten caught up in the drain. And then other stuff tries to come down the drain. And then it's like that, oh gross. And again, maybe it looks more gross than it smells. But a lot of times it will back up in the tub. And then the water, the icky water will leave a ring around the tub. And then the bottom of the tub will have like this caked on gunk. So even if in a last minute, we're talking about last minute, the realtor calls them on my way over and you've got a gunky tub, you don't have an hour to clean it out. You just don't. So there are a couple of secrets that I have that I want to show you. And I'll make myself big on the screen here. This is one that we use as professional cleaners. And this is just a little zip that goes down inside the drain. You feed it down inside the drain all the way down until you get to the handle. And then you just kind of wiggle it back out. And as you wiggle it back out, it pulls out all the hair and all of the gunk. So you're going to end up with a great big handful of gunk. But then you can throw it in the trash. No chemicals whatsoever. It doesn't have a strong chemical smell. But that will free up the drain so that you don't have hair sliding down the drain. And so the secret to that is fill up the tub with water or fill the sink with water because that way this goes down a whole lot easier than going down a dry drain. It's going to wet the hair. It's going to let you go through all of that stuff that's clogged up the pipes going down. And it snakes itself through. It's called a drain auger or a drain snake. As it goes through that, when you pull that back up, the sink or the tub is already full of water. So when you pull it up, now it has water to kind of like ease the process. And that way when you see the water drain out, you know, you got all the hair. So there you go. There's a tip. There's another product we have that's the Tub Shroom. This is a little stopper and it goes right inside the drain. You just remove the drain and you put this inside there. It has a little tiny hole so that the air goes down in it. But the hair that goes down spins around it and you just pull the stopper out and you can clean it off. So either of these two work really, really well. Again, no chemicals required. But I recommend that if you're going to sell your house, that you have one or both of these on hand at all times. And that way your sinks will always drain properly. Your tubs will always drain properly. Your showers will drain properly. They sell bigger ones like this for the shower because the whole of the shower is a little bit bigger. But that way on the spur of the moment, if your tub has clogged up and it won't because of this, but if it does, you just pop that out and clean it off really quick and you're good to go. So we don't want to raise questions that no one's asking. But a lot of smell can get trapped in that and then it can just be really nasty where this is what you're smelling when you come to a house. And that's just super gross. Quick question on that. A lot of those in the sinks don't come out without some work. Can you explain to us how you pull that stopper out of the sink? Yeah, there's actually a little tiny hook and it just hooks in place. So if you'll just kind of like turn it a half a dial and then tilt it sideways, they pop right out. Wonderful. Okay. From the real estate side, we have inspections done on homes, typically during the option period. And if there's a slow draining sink, the inspector will always recommend a licensed professional plumber to come out and address the situation, which is at least a $200 service call for most plumbers, plus the time they're there, plus the equipment. So that usually turns into quite a bill for people if they have a slow draining sink. And we run into that on almost every cell, especially when it comes to upstairs restrooms. For whatever reason, it seems like there's a lot of hair that gets stuck in those. And so we run into that all the time and it turns into a huge bill for sellers. So that seems like a very easy quick fix. Yeah. And it's not that the adjuster is trying to cause a bunch of extra charge to the family, but what it comes down to is they're going to recommend, it's their name on the line, right? They're being paid to do a service. They're going to recommend a professional, because that's somebody that's going to come in and make sure that it's done correctly, so that you don't have that problem again. It's possible that a house cleaner could come in and use something like the drain snake, but so can a homeowner. A homeowner doesn't need to hire a professional house cleaner for this. It takes all of about, I'm not kidding, it takes probably about nine or 10 seconds to actually do the whole process. Save yourself a couple hundred bucks and clear the drains, but do this on a daily basis. If you have teenagers with long hair, this is going to be a problem. Maybe it's not a problem today, but if you are the family that keeps buying all of these heavy duty chemicals that you're pouring by the jug down the drain to dissolve that hair, it might benefit you to invest like four or five bucks or whatever this costs and put one of these in every drain where the showers are happening or the teeth is brushing or hair is brushing or whatever happens in that sink that's causing those sinks to plug up. So anyway, like Aaron said, you can save yourself. Yeah, I was just going to say talking with plumbers, they usually say it's typically in the p-trap there is where a lot of the stuff gets caught. And so hiring a plumber to come out and do it, it does run several hundred dollars at minimum. Speaking of several hundred dollars, this is in every kitchen and this is just an icky gunk garbage disposal. And this happens in everybody's house. Everybody pours food down their garbage disposal and then you get this weird nasty little mold and it's smelly that's around the rubber ring that goes inside there and then everything below that. So on a regular basis, what we recommend if that little rubber stopper comes out, that you soak this in hydrogen peroxide maybe on a weekly basis. That way it will eat up all of the organic compounds that are on that little stopper that goes down the sink that little drain stopper and it will eat all that up so that that doesn't smell bad because you can have a perfectly what looks like a clean garbage disposal and then it smells really bad. And what you're not realizing is that what you're smelling is the rubber with all the gunk that has built up around it because the rubber was not cleaned on a regular basis. So just a little tiny cup with hydrogen peroxide in it, put that rubber stopper in it, leave it for an hour, take it out. You can do this like if you go to bed at night the next morning when you get up, take it out of the thing, rinse it off and put it inside. You don't even need to scrub it off. It will just eat up all that stuff and then you've got a clean rubber stopper to put back inside your garbage disposal. There are lots of solutions for cleaning the garbage disposal but one of my favorite is like if you eat oranges or you eat lemons, throw the peel down there, grind them up and as it grinds them up you've got that nice citrus smell that's a natural organic smell and it's not strong harsh chemicals. So that's what we have. All right I have more tips but we're going to stop there for today. I'm going to answer your question in our lightning round. So I'm super excited about this. We will bring Erin back. Erin welcome back and anybody that has a question add a cue in front of it and we will go through and we'll answer as many of these as we can for the next eight minutes. So let's see. Gen X says Armin Hammer also makes dehumidifying tubs and hanging packs. Yes they do. So it doesn't have to be the damp red. I just like the damp red because it's a known brand and we reuse these a lot. So you can buy them in big packs, little packs. This is a reusable one so you can just buy it in the big bucket. They sell this in a big bucket and I like it because this also addresses the odor as well as the humidity. So the baking soda does not and maybe the hanging packet does. I don't know about that one but I do know that the packets work really well. So and also speaking of baking soda if you have a dishwasher you open up the dishwasher and you get knocked out with the smell. You can sprinkle baking soda at the bottom of your dishwasher and you can just run a cycle. Just leave it until you do your next cycle. That will all wash down and it will have eaten up all the standing odors between now and the next time that you use your dishwasher. Go ahead Erin I'll let you take this one. Oh let's see. Virginia had asked how long after the process would you wait before showing the house and will there still be a bleach odor? I'm not sure how long it takes for bleach to disappear. The smell of bleach. I know that when we walk through homes with clients it's nice not to have a real harsh chemical smell and people pick up on it really quickly so. But like my friend said the other day when we walked into the house and it had this overpowering smell they immediately felt like something was being masked and we don't want to mask the smells because that is frightening to people when they don't know is it is it just like hey the house didn't smell like anything and they felt like it should smell like something or is there something growing behind the walls right and so it is possible even a rodent could get trapped between your walls and then it rots and then you have just horrible smells that you can't get rid of and I don't know is that is that one of those? Jen X says how about pungent cooking odors particularly involving grease and curry? This for this we use the ozone machine and the reason I say that is because grease once grease gets on like the blinds and on the tapestries and stuff like that and it's in the air. Grease I don't know why but it has a rancid smell it can go rancid and so it's not just like oh hey the house smells like bacon or something but it now smells like rancid bacon right so a lot of times even plants like regular plants live plants or silk plants will get that smell on them and sometimes it's easier to just toss the plant because the smell is so bad just on the ferns like people put them above their kitchen cabinets and then they get gunky and greasy and as much as you try to wash them sometimes you can't get that smell out so there are things that we recommend you actually rip it out and throw it away so great question uh Sheila says great advice thank you've been thinking about a tub's room and glad to hear that they have one for the size shower drain it looks a little bit different but yes they are fabulous and they work really really well that's why we recommend them is because it reduces the need to go in and to unclog the drains and like Aaron said can save you quite a bit in plumbing expenses. Do buyers typically open cupboards yes 100% of the time they do always they always open all of the cupboards and see if what they have will fit in them I would highly recommend cleaning your cupboards out as much as possible and if possible take 50% of whatever is in your cupboard out before you sell your home put it in a box put it in the garage will make the cupboards look a lot bigger and people will come in and go oh my goodness all my stuff will for sure fit awesome tip thank you for that uh Rachel Rowe says hi lovely Angela hey thank you so much she says sometimes the washing machine drawer gets a little woofy what would you recommend please thank you um you're so polite thank you please thank you I love that so for the washing machine the great news about the washing machine is it has a little as to two areas one is for the soap now and one is for the fabric softener later so where we do not like to mix cleaning chemicals at all what you can do is put one inside the detergent and you can put a different chemical inside the fabric softener pouch because they happen at different times of the washing cycle so what you can do is put your detergent in the regular washing machine and in that fabric softener area you can put a half a cup of vinegar and what happens is vinegar has a very strong smell of its own but when it goes through your washing machine on that last part of the cycle all the soap has already happened in the washing machine and it's gone through the rinse cycle and then it brings in the the part which is supposed to be the fabric softener that's where you bring in the vinegar and oh boy does it clean out the inside of your washing machine so we use vinegar a lot it fluffs up the towels it removes the smell like if you've ever had and I hope this never happens to you but if you have ever had like a broken washing machine for a pinch and you haven't washed your clothes for I don't know they sat in the washing machine for a night overnight or a day or something like that then you try to wash them again and they still kind of smell like they're not quite fresh you can run a half a cup of vinegar in there and not only will it clean your washing machine but it will also remove that nasty smell of the clothes that just don't seem to come clean at all so vinegar do you add that vinegar with other solutions or is it just vinegar so just vinegar in the fabric softener area you don't mix it with anything you put your detergent in the detergent pocket then the separate softener area that is usually for liquid you put your vinegar in there and it happens like I said at two different times of the cycle so it's not directly mixing the chemicals does that make sense okay cool all right and Virginia says this cleans and deodorizes the mattress let it completely dry do this once every three to four weeks I feel like somebody somewhere gave a great tip and so I don't know what that one is about but if you got mattress tips yay I will find those later in the notes here Natasha says have you ever had an unpredictable hazardous situation using ozone that is predictable when properly used I have never but I don't use anything until I'm really a hundred percent how it works and why it works and what the precautions are I'm really really big on using safety data sheets for all of the chemicals that we use for this reason if I'm going to go inside someone's house their house is their biggest investment in most cases and so I don't want to bring anything into someone's home if I'm not a hundred percent sure how it works and how to use it because I don't want to experiment on my customers homes and that if it's a chemical I don't want to use a chemical in their homes if I'm not a hundred percent sure that it's safe on their surfaces because since I started my cleaning business back in 1991 all the surfaces changed there are a lot of surfaces now that are not they're not real it's not real granted it might be like a complex quartz or something that they've mixed together that's like a fabricated something and if you use the wrong chemical on it it could like oxidize or it could change the colors or whatever I don't want to be responsible for that because even if even if you kind of know what you're doing you're still responsible if that's in your care custody and control so when it comes to the ozone machine please understand what you're using and know how to use it but I've never had a problem with the ozone machine and I highly recommend it if you're going to use chemicals with strong smells all right Erin our time is up I talked too long I didn't give you much time to talk do you have anything else that you want to say to wrap this up before we we let our friends back to their day it is it is so fun having all of these questions and getting to chat with everybody we super enjoy this and of course the more questions you bring the the more we can give you answers hopefully too so and as soon as this conversation is over we will be answering still in the we've linked this up to YouTube if you're watching us on YouTube right now if you're watching us on Facebook we will be answering the questions thereafter so let this not be the end of the conversation we want to get all of your questions answered because we want you to have a great opportunity when you show your house and we don't want you to lose the sale of your home based on a lingering smell all right that's it for today I'll see you guys same time same place next week and we'll be talking more about other things that you can do to sell your home until then have a great week and thanks you guys again for joining us