How to Make Your Chicago Home Smell Amazing (And Find Hidden Odors)

Between work, family, and everything else, keeping your Chicago home fresh can feel impossible. That funky smell you’ve gotten used to? Guests notice it immediately. Let’s fix that with pro tips to eliminate odors at the source—because someone to clean my apartment shouldn’t be your only solution.

Stop Masking Odors – Hunt Them Down

Like Toucan Sam says: follow your nose! Spraying air freshener over last week’s forgotten leftovers just creates a war of smells. Common Chicago culprits:

• Pet accidents in carpets (especially after winter salt gets tracked in)
• Overflowing trash bins in small apartments
• Steamy bathrooms without proper ventilation

Soft Surfaces: The Sneaky Smell Traps

Your sheets, curtains, and rugs absorb odors like a sponge. That “lived-in” scent? It’s sweat, cooking grease, and city grime.

Fix it fast:

• Wash bedding weekly in hot water with ½ cup baking soda
• Vacuum upholstery and rugs twice monthly (more if you have pets)
• Refresh closet smells with sachets of activated charcoal

Chicago-Proof Your Air Quality

Between lake humidity and winter lockdowns, our indoor air needs help. Try these deep cleaning help boosters:

• Open windows strategically: Early mornings before rush hour pollution peaks
• Upgrade furnace filters: Change every season (look for MERV 11-13)
• HEPA vacuum: Traps dust that makes apartments smell stale

3 Cheap Odor Absorbers Every Chicagoan Needs

Skip the expensive sprays and grab these from any local store:

1. White Vinegar

Bowls placed around rooms neutralize smells (perfect for post-cooking odors).

2. Baking Soda

Sprinkle on carpets before vacuuming or leave an open box in musty closets.

3. Activated Charcoal

Works wonders for shoe storage and near litter boxes.

When DIY Isn’t Enough

Some smells need pro-level attention—especially in older Chicago buildings where odors seep into walls. If you’ve tried everything but still catch whiffs of mystery funk, it might be time to schedule a cleaning with specialists who know how to banish stubborn smells for good.

Pro Tip: The Sniff Test

Ask a friend to honestly assess your home’s scent. We go nose-blind to our own spaces! For fast cleaning services before guests arrive, focus on:

• Wiping down kitchen trash cans with vinegar
• Running laundry with a cup of white vinegar
• Simmering citrus peels and cinnamon sticks

our sense of smell is really important if we walk into a space and it smells amazing we instantly feel at ease relaxed stimulated and overall just good but the opposite holds true as well if you walk into a space and it smells bad or funky or off or questionable all the sudden all of the alarm bells are going off in our head is something dirty is something wrong should I even be here this is gross like it just starts to send the wrong signals to your brain so ideally when you walk into your own home or when someone else walks into your own home you want it to smell amazing and what happens to us as creatures of habit and people who get used to their space we become nose blind to our own smells so oftentimes we don’t even pay attention to what our home smells like but when someone else steps in oh trust me they notice so in this video I want to help us figure out where those bad smells are coming from we’re going to get to the root of the source we are going to get to the cause we’re going to solve that problem and we are going to make your home smell amazing so that both you and anyone who comes through your door will appreciate enjoy and savor that smell and just a quick reminder if you haven’t done so already to subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel and a quick note to mention that this video is brought to you by Makerscle which is our sister company makers Clean sells premium microfiber cleaning tools and so much more you can visit us at makerscle.com or makerscle.ca you can see everything that we sell you can join the email list lots of fun things to do over there give this video a thumbs up for good smelling places and stick around to the end of this video where I’m going to share with you the story of when my house smelled its absolute worst and it was quite the caper we had to spend a lot of time and there was a lot of drama figuring this problem out i have Molly with me for this first point because I think she really paints a good picture and that is you want to always find the source of your odor you don’t want to mask it you know I rarely take advice from a cereal box but I’m going to quote Toucan Sam here you really do need to follow your nose you have to look for the source of the odor and deal with it instead of using a product that’s going to mask the odor that will never solve the problem that’s just going to be a battle of two smells and you’re going to constantly be trying to one up the smell as the smell oneups your attempt and so on and so forth so of course pets can be a cause of odors but we’re going to cover so many different causes and how to deal with that later on in this video the thing I really want to get across here is be a hunter look for the cause don’t cover it up the bedroom is a perfect place to talk about soft surfaces and soft surfaces are quite the culprit when it comes to odors in your home let me explain why any soft surface that we have whether it’s bed sheets carpets uh window coverings pillows clothing all of these things are soft they absorb bacteria they absorb dander hair dust dirt odor-causing molecules and they just sit there so we wash our clothes fairly regularly so they don’t smell but other soft surfaces around our home we can’t say the same for i mean seriously how often are you washing your window coverings or your rug you know if you don’t clean your sheets on a regular basis you get that kind of like sweaty kind of stench in your room that’s because sweat and oils and all of that stuff are just building up on your sheets and smelling so if you have a smell problem in your home it really could come down to taking care of the soft surfaces over the past couple of years you’ve probably heard a lot of chatter about indoor air quality and the hype is real in our case specifically having good indoor air quality means that your house is going to smell better now there are a few ways that you can achieve better indoor air quality let’s run through a few of them first the easiest cheapest and most accessible is to open your windows generally speaking when the temperature isn’t crazy hot or crazy cold we crank a couple of windows in the house to get a nice cross breeze going this helps to move air through our house get the stale air out and bring the fresh air in now keep in mind if you live close to a highway or a plant you might want to be mindful of the times that you’re opening your windows but if you live in a suburb or in a high-rise you should be okay any time of day of course you can improve your indoor air quality by using an air purifier an air purifier’s job is essentially to suck in air floating around your home clean it through whatever system it uses and then shoot out fresh clean air and fresh clean air should smell like nothing on that note it’s really important to make sure that you’re changing out your furnace filters four times a year once at every change of the season that way your furnace can work at its optimum performance level and your air will be fresh be clean but also smell it and of course it wouldn’t be an air quality conversation if we didn’t talk about my least favorite cleaning job vacuuming but vacuuming is so important to indoor air quality because dust which is all over our home falls to the ground dust contains odor-causing particles dander hair dead skin cells dirt you name it and as that stuff builds up and floats around our homes it creates small odors here and there but over time that builds up and that can make your home smell really stuffy so get a good quality HEPA vacuum and help improve your indoor air quality but specifically the smell of your indoor air there are three odor absorbers that are easy to come by inexpensive and gentle they are white vinegar baking soda and activated charcoal and these among the other things that they do are great odor absorbers and the cool thing is you don’t even really have to do anything to them for vinegar for example you just put it in a bowl and put it in the smelly area in fact people used to do this when they would have parties inside their homes and there were smokers they would just put out bowls of vinegar and that would absorb cigarette odor pretty amazing baking soda I love using for deodorizing people who have been watching Clean My Space for a long time know this i talk about it all the time for example if you have a closet that smells really stuffy like my front hall closet sometimes I’ll go in there and do voiceovers for Instagram reels or Tik Tok videos and it smells it’s like stale Doritos and dirty shoes so the way to fix that is to put a little bowl or a sache of baking soda in the corner boom makes all the difference and activated charcoal works much the same in fact many kitty litter products and other deodorizers even uh your organics bin sometimes the lid comes with an activated charcoal filter so that that absorbs odors all three of these very easy to come by inexpensive and gentle if you’re looking for ways to take the smell of your home beyond just neutral cuz we’ve talked quite a bit about how to neutralize the smell of your home you can consider using essential oils around your home this is a small fraction of my collection some of the reasons why I love using essential oils to make my home smell great is because you can control for the scent so unlike a candle or an air freshener or a plug-in which is very strong and constant essential oils can be ephemeral you can use them and they can dissipate fairly quickly so you can really control for them next you can choose the combinations that you like so you might not want to smell Hawaiian orchid all the time you might want to smell a little bit of peppermint a little bit of lavender you might want to mix the two you might want to experiment essential oils allow you to do that you can also use them with an essential oil diffuser if you like you can use them in your mop bucket or your spray bottle to kind of elevate your mood during the cleaning experience which I personally need but what I love the most is that you’re using something that is naturally derived that you are creating yourself it’s not a perfume it’s not something where you can’t read the ingredients you know exactly what you’re getting look if you’re not sure if your house has a bad smell ask someone who you trust to come over give it a little sniff and give you an honest opinion and that way you can take these action steps and sort things out because I want your house to smell amazing again for you and anyone else that steps through that door and that brings me to this week’s comment question which is what is your ideal home scent i would love to know in the comments down below is it something perfumey herbbally floral woodsy yes I said herbbally herbbally I don’t know you can comment about that as well go make fun of me have fun for me you know I find floral to be a little extra i don’t love that i love something more natural something herbbally like I love eucalyptus and lavender i also love woodsy scents like sandalwood but let me know your favorite combo in the comments down below if you love what we do here at Clean My Space consider becoming part of the Clean My Space community and joining our membership program okay now here is that terrible smelling story i walked in to my house and I noticed there was a smell it was a little off it was a little It was giving like dead squirrel but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it cuz I’m like there are no We don’t have a critter problem in this house and do I even know what a dead squirrel smells like no but I just walked in and something smelled very off and then I was like a blood hound i was like like sniffing around the whole house trying to figure out what was going on and the one place that we didn’t check was in our cold cellar as it turned out there was a power outage a few days before and we had a chest freezer in this room um and the chest freezer kind of died when the power went out so it never turned back on and we had a bunch of meat in there like frozen you know deep freeze meat and that meat did what rotting meat does and let me tell you there was vomit involved and that freezer uh and that smell no longer is a problem in this house and I’ve also learned my lesson about checking all appliances and all closed doors when a bad smell makes its way into my home something else that can smell really bad over time are your towels and if you want to figure out how to make your towels smell better you can check out this video right over here where I talk about how to revitalize your towels and make them smell great again and if you don’t like smelly towels you should totally check out Makers Clean because our bath sheets and bath towels do not smell so there you go if you haven’t done so already make sure that you subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you next time