Northern West Virginia odors, gone for good.

Yes, arranged with you in advance. We would rather agree a realistic date than promise same-day and let you down. The properties we get called to in this part of West Virginia tend to be older, often with deep cellars, crawl spaces or both, and the two problems that come with that are damp holding in masonry and timber, and drain traps that have dried out. Neither is complicated. Both need somebody to work out which one you have before treating, rather than another round of 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.

They get confused constantly and the fix for one does nothing for the other. Mildew is earthy, steady, and worse when it is warm and damp. Sewer gas is sharper, often sulfurous, and it comes and goes. Before you call anyone, pour a jug of water down every drain nobody uses, a basement floor drain, a spare shower, a utility sink. Those traps dry out in a few weeks and then vent the drain line straight into the room, and that one job fixes a surprising number of these. If the smell survives that, you are usually looking at a failed toilet seal, a cracked vent stack or a septic issue, and those want a plumber before they want us. We deal with what the odor left behind once the source is closed.

Tell us the ZIP and the type of property when we call you back and we will give you the soonest date we can genuinely keep, rather than a promise we might miss. The treatment, the equipment and the guarantee are the same in every market we cover. It is worth telling us everything on that call, so we arrive with what the job needs the first time.

It is one of the most common reasons people call us, and the timing that works is after the clear-out and before the photographs. Smell is the first thing a buyer registers, before they have looked at a single room, and it is the objection nobody talks themselves out of afterwards. It is also the one thing a viewer will not raise with your agent, so you tend to find out through the offers rather than the feedback. We treat the source so the house reads as clean rather than heavily scented, because buyers are wise to a house that smells strongly of anything, including air freshener. Agents in the West Virginia river counties tend to be blunt about this, and they are usually right.

If the smell comes back within 7 days of your treatment, we come back and fix it, and you do not pay twice. That is the whole of the guarantee, and it is deliberately short and plain. 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.

Usually not. The methods we use are chosen so a room can be occupied again quickly, and hydroxyl generators in particular are safe to run with people in the building, which is the main reason we use them instead of ozone. Ozone is not safe to breathe. It is effective, and it is also the reason so many people have a story about a car or a house that smelled of chemical for a week afterwards and then smelled of smoke again. We do not own one. For most jobs in the West Virginia river counties you are out of the affected rooms for a few hours rather than out of the house.

That is the most common call we get, and it is not bad workmanship. Smoke residue is not on the surface, it is in it. Tar and nicotine condense out of warm air and work into plaster, drywall paper, timber, carpet backing and the inside of the ductwork, so a heavy clean and two coats buy you a few weeks and the first warm humid day brings it back through. Sealing does have a place, but only after the residue underneath has been dealt with and only on surfaces that genuinely cannot be treated. Doing it in the wrong order is the most expensive mistake we see, because the paint has to come off again before anyone can get at the problem.