Removing tobacco smells from laundry

Here's a recent tip we've picked up to remove the smell of smokers from our holiday cottage laundry, the towels, the bedding, rugs and soft furnishing covers. We were surprised it worked so well and doesn't require the purchase of proprietary cleansing products.

When washing the contaminated laundry, don't bother adding fabric conditioner, just add about 150 ml of  distilled white vinegar to the main wash cycle in addition to the normal detergent.  The result doesn't smell of vinegar.  It also leaves towels fluffy too.

Washing Load

Our guests rarely see is the amount of work involved in preparing for each guest holiday. Here's a photo of a laundry collection after a couple of guests have left after a week's stay. It represents 2-3 loads in our large washing machine.

Part of that load are cushion covers for the settee in the lounge. One of them became heavily stained by one of the guests. This occurred a few days after we'd installed freshly laundered cushion covers on the settee.  It's a grease stain which required us to use solvents to remove the mark.

At least twice a month we take bedding to a local laundry service to have bed linen professionally ironed. The costs of this facility mount up, but it improves the quality offered to our guests. Typically we spend around £12 per booking visit for this service, this excludes the  costs of first running the load through our washing machine and dryer. Here's a copy of one of the bills.