Getting rid of paint smell

Last Updated on Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:48 by ermand Sunday, 12 February 2012 06:41

Today’s question comes from Aaren. Aaren asks:

Hi hope you can help! My daughter’s room will not stop smelling. In fact, I challenged Olympic Paint and Lowe’s – going back and forth until we settled. KILZ and another coat of paint reproduced the original smell! Olympic even paid a professional to do all that work for us. The second coat of Premium One water based latex interior paint still smells. We have 2 air purifiers and had our windows opens for a week while painting and for 12 days afterward. …. As of today however we are dealing with a smell from Friday. It’s awful and I’m afraid to let my daughter sleep in there (although she has for two nights). WHAT can I do to make it go away. The room seems like it’s cursed. No other room in our house ever smelled like this… Please help with ideas of what to do. How long is this supposed to last. The smell is like a sweet, clay smell. It doesn’t really smell like paint at all. We even crawled into the attic to check for smell and it wasn’t present. We tried sprays, onions, vinegar, steam cleaning. Everything. Your advice would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks. Aaren

To be honest I personally have never experienced prolonged smelling after painting a room. Usually something like that might happen if there is excessive moisture which makes the paint dry slower and may contribute to the paint smelling. To try to get rid of the smell I would put a container with some coffee in it. If it doesn’t remove the smell at least will enhance the air a bit.

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1 Comment

1. John Mitchell   |  Wednesday, 02 May 2012 at 6:24 pm

   I may be having the same problem that Aaren had. I recently painted two rooms (a master bedroom and an adjacent bathroom) with Olympic Premium paint purchased from Lowe’s. Two coats all around on top of sheet rock. For a day or so there was the typically newly painted odor in the room but that dissipated. After several weeks, the master bedroom developed an odor which is different than fresh paint. It’s not an awful odor but it isn’t what I want to be smelling all the time. When I sniff right up against the wall, I don’t really get the smell. But it is always there in the room and seems to be noticeable in other areas of the house. I had the person who does my pest control stop by for a sniff test to try to determine if a critter might have died inside the wall, but he detected nothing that smelled like that (and, besides, those odors generally go away after a few days.)

   I’d would REALLY appreciate the benefit of any experience you had with either Olympic or Lowe’s. I would be very interested in direct contact with Aaren if he/she would be so inclined.