New York's toughest odors, gone for good.

Because paint is a lid, not a fix. Smoke residue is oily and it goes into plaster, into the paper facing of any drywall, into the gaps between floorboards, and into the backs of cabinets and closets where nobody paints. Sealing the surface holds it for a few weeks, then warm weather and humidity push it back through, which is usually when people call us. What we do first is work out how far it actually went, because in a pre-war apartment the answer is often the floor and the closets rather than the walls everyone has been looking at.

Sometimes, and we will be straight with you about which situation you are in. If odor is arriving through a shared riser, a shaft, an old dumbwaiter or gaps around radiator pipes, we can seal the paths into your apartment and treat what has already settled into your finishes, and that is often a real improvement. What we cannot do is treat someone else's unit without their agreement, so if the source is next door and it is ongoing, the honest answer is that our work buys you comfort while the building deals with the cause. We would rather say that before quoting than after.

Boards are routine for us rather than an obstacle. We carry $1,000,000 general liability and we will send a certificate of insurance naming the building and the managing agent ahead of the visit, which is normally what the board actually wants. Tell us the building's service elevator hours and any weekend rules when you book, because those decide how we schedule rather than whether we can do the work. Most apartments are finished in one visit of one to four hours.

Because by the time a room smells, the urine is almost never still in the carpet. It has gone through the backing, through the underlay and into the subfloor, and in an older house it will have found the gaps between the boards. Cleaning the carpet treats the layer holding the least of it. Urine also crystallizes as it dries, which is why the smell surges on a humid day and fades on a dry one, and why steam cleaning can briefly make it worse: you have just added moisture to the salts. We work out how far it went before deciding what to treat, and sometimes that means lifting a section of carpet to look. Knowing is cheaper than guessing.

We quote per job rather than publishing a rate, because the same smell in two houses is not the same job. What moves the price is how far the odor has travelled, not how bad it smells on the day. Cigarette smoke that has been in a house for years has gone into drywall, carpet backing and the inside of the ductwork, and that is a different piece of work to the same smell in a rental that was smoked in for one winter. Tell us the room count, the odor, and roughly how long it has been there, and we will call you back with a real number rather than a range that means nothing. The quote is free and there is no charge for a visit that turns into advice rather than work.

No, though it is common enough that people accept it. A musty smell is the by-product of organic material staying wet: untreated timber, cardboard boxes, old carpet, drywall that wicked up water once and never fully dried. It is worse in summer because warm humid air meets cool basement surfaces and condenses on them, which is the opposite of what most people expect. Before treating anything it is worth knowing whether the space is actively wet or only humid, because they need different answers. Active water is a drainage or sump problem and has to be fixed first. We will not tell you a treatment fixes a leak, and if water is still getting in we will say so before you spend money rather than after.

Manhattan and the five boroughs is a short drive from our base, which is close enough that same or next day is normal rather than a best case. If you call in the morning with something small there is a reasonable chance of that afternoon. What we will not do is take the booking and then push you back twice, so if the day is genuinely full we will tell you the next real slot when you call. Give us the ZIP and the type of property and we will pin a time down rather than say we will be in touch.

We come back and treat it again, and you do not pay twice. That is the whole of the guarantee, and it is deliberately short because a guarantee with conditions attached is not one. The reason we can offer it is that we treat the source instead of covering it, so there is usually nothing left to come back. Where a smell does return, it is almost always because something is still feeding it: water still getting in, a drain still open to the sewer, an animal still in the wall. In that situation we will tell you what needs fixing first rather than keep re-treating a symptom and billing you for it.