How to Make Your Room Smell Good Naturally: 26 Easy Methods
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Whether it’s cigarette smoke, blocked drains, or bad food, bad smells can spread around the house and turn your palace of luxury into a nightmare. A bad smell is uninviting, and it can even prevent you from getting to sleep, stop you from concentrating, and ruin time when you should be unwinding and relaxing.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of potential causes of bad smells, but there is also a great selection of methods you can use to help improve the smell of a room without having to rely on chemicals.
Below are 26 easy methods to naturally make your room smell better. If you don’t find the source of the bad smell and eliminate it, it will return in time.
The 26 Methods to Make Your Room Smell Good Naturally
1. Start Cleaning
The first place to start when looking to make a room smell good is to clean. Put everything in its place, remove the rubbish, shift the dirty plates, and then vacuum, dust, and mop. Doing so can help you identify any potential sources of bad smells while removing anything that could be causing a stale aroma. It also gets rid of musty smells, and the polish and cleaning materials can also leave a better smell in the room.
2. Air the House
Airing the house encourages fresh air and also gets rid of stale air. Open up your home to the outside world by opening at least two doors or windows (one at either end of the house). And, if you have multiple floors, try to ensure one open window on the ground floor and one on the top floor.
If you can open more doors and windows, it will bring greater benefits. You can also put fans on to help circulate the air better.
3. Bake
Realtors have long used this technique to bring a homely aroma to a property. Bake a fresh loaf of bread, a batch of cookies, or a cake. The smell will spread through the house and could mask any bad aromas that might be lingering.
Do ensure you don’t burn the food, though, because the smell of burned food and smoke is very difficult to get rid of.
4. Make Coffee
Another old realtor trick is to make fresh coffee. Coffee has a rich and distinctive aroma, and many people that don’t like the taste of coffee still like the smell of the coffee beans. Instant coffee won’t really give the results you want, but a pot of dark roast will give your house a distinctive smell.
5. Get the Freshly Baked Smell Without Baking
If you’re not really into baking or you want the result without having to spend hours measuring and mixing, you can enjoy the aromas of fresh baking without having to do any actual baking.
Put some cinnamon sticks in the oven on low heat or combine them with cloves and fresh ginger in a pot of simmering water. It will give the same great scent, although you won’t have the benefit of freshly baked cookies.
6. Add Dryer Sheets
In the dryer, dryer sheets serve several purposes. As well as adding a fresh scent to the laundry, they also remove static to give them a fresh feel. While you won’t be able to enjoy this benefit by putting them in your drawers or your wardrobe, new dryer sheets will still impart some of their aroma on your clothes and help to get rid of any stale or dusty smells.
7. Wash the Bedding
People sweat a lot when they sleep, even in the middle of winter, and this sweat gets into the bedding and even into the mattress. The bed can be the main culprit of any bad bedroom smell. Take off the bedding, give it a good wash, and try to hang it outside to dry.
8. Vanilla Extract Cotton Balls
Cotton balls are good at soaking up liquids and vanilla extract is good at masking aromas, so combining them makes a lot of sense. You don’t need too much vanilla extract. Just add a few drops to a cotton ball.
You can place the balls in any room or any area, but they are especially effective in the fridge to get rid of the smell of stale food or any aroma that’s been left by food and drink spills.
9. Vanilla Extract Bowls
Vanilla extra has a sweet smell and, as well as putting some on cotton balls, you can add it to water and put the resulting vanilla water in a bowl. Leave it for a while and the smell will dissipate around the room.
Alternatively, place a bowl a few feet in front of a fan and the fan will do the job of dispersing the vanilla smell more quickly.
10. Citrus Bowls
Rather than using vanilla extract, you can use citrus fruits like lemon. Squeeze a few drops of lemon into a bowl of water. If you use warm water, it will give off a lemony scent sooner than if you use cold weather.
11. Vinegar Bowls
Vinegar can neutralize odors, but it does also leave quite a strong smell while it is in the room. However, if you do need to get rid of musty or sweaty smells, putting a small amount of white vinegar in a bowl of water in a prominent position will help eliminate odors.
12. Make Your Own Reed Diffusers
Reed diffusers are an effective way of spreading the aroma of essential oils around a room, without the need to burn or heat them. Rather than buying reed diffusers, though, you can make your own.
Use a bottle, glass, or jar with a narrow neck and add almond oil and 20 drops of essential oil before placing bamboo skewers in the top of the container. It will take a little while for the smell to start to spread, but it will.
13. Make A Rosemary Wreath
You can buy wreath frames for a few dollars. You can use plants like eucalyptus and pine branches to create a pleasant-smelling wreath or make one from rosemary to give it a really strong and effective scent.
14. Natural Fragrance for the Garbage Disposal
The garbage disposal is a functional and useful tool in the kitchen, but it can really start to smell of old, stale food after a while. One of the easiest ways to treat this smell is to dispose of pleasant-smelling foods, like lemon and orange peels, before running water through the disposal. You can also add salt, which is an abrasive substance that eliminates odors while also cleaning the pipes.
15. Freeze Coffee Grounds
If your freezer starts to smell, which often happens after the power goes out and food is left to warm up, you can add an open container of coffee grounds and let them freeze. This works with fresh or used coffee grounds.
16. Cook Citrus Zest
Zest a lemon and add the zest to a pan of water before boiling it. This serves the dual purpose of creating a fresh lemon scent in the kitchen while also cleaning and freshening up the pan that you’re using.
17. Add Eucalyptus to the Shower
Eucalyptus has an amazing smell that a lot of people love, which is why it is found in a lot of bathing products. Tie a few eucalyptus branches together and put them behind the shower head. The steam from the hot water and the movement created by the water from the shower head will release and disperse the smell around the shower and the bathroom.
18. Freshen Up Your Light Bulbs
Although energy-saving and modern bulbs don’t get as hot as traditional bulbs, they do still get warm, and this is another way that you can use vanilla oil to bring a sweet scent to your home.
When the bulb is cool, wipe a couple of drops of the oil on the bulb, and when it warms up after being turned on, the bulb will spread the smell of vanilla around the room.
19. Clean Containers With Tomato Juice
We use plastic containers for a lot of different purposes. We store cooked food and fresh food in them and also use them in the microwave. They are useful, but the plastic can retain smells. Try adding tomato juice to the containers before swirling and rinsing.
20. Baking Soda in the Garbage
Baking soda is an incredibly useful and powerful cleaning aid, and it can even help get rid of stubborn aromas from one of the worst-smelling parts of the house: the garbage can. When you empty the bin, sprinkle some baking soda in there and it will soak up the aromas.
21. Using Unlit Candles
Scented candles are obviously a good way to introduce a pleasant smell to a room, or the house in general, but you don’t even have to light them for them to be useful. Place a couple of unlit candles in the airing cupboard or laundry cupboard and the clothes will take on the aroma from the candles.
22. Fragrance the Vacuum Bag
The vacuum picks up a lot of dirt and grime, and this can start to smell. One way to get rid of this smell, which could be transmitted to surfaces around the home, is to drop a ball of cotton wool with a few drops of perfume into the bag or cylinder. Rather than leaving a dirty or burned smell behind, the vacuum will start to gently give off the perfumed aroma instead.
23. Baking Soda on the Carpets
Liberally sprinkle baking soda into the carpet after you’ve vacuumed, leave it overnight, and then vacuum the baking soda up. During this time, it will have soaked up and neutralized a lot of the stale aroma that carpets can attract.
24. Burn Citrus Peels
Natural fires can look great, and when they’re burning good firewood, the smell can be appealing, too. However, once the fire is out, it can be a source of a smoky smell that gets through the whole house.
As well as ensuring that you fully clean the fire out and get rid of the used ashes, you can burn citrus peel the next time you light the fire.
25. Microwave Vanilla Extract
In some kitchens, the microwave comes in for heavy use, but it isn’t uncommon for food to bubble and spill while in the small box. Food remnants can start to smell especially when they are cooked over and over again.
Put a bit of vanilla extract in a microwavable container and microwave it for a minute to improve the smell of your kitchen gadget.
26. Fragrance Your Filters
Whether it’s an HVAC or furnace filter, it can start to smell after a while, but you don’t want to have to replace the filter every time it starts to give off a bit of a smell. Instead, add a couple of drops of essential oil to the filter after cleaning it, and the smell will spread through your home.
Conclusion
Keeping a house smelling fresh and pleasant can be challenging. There are lots of potential causes of bad smells and even if there isn’t a particularly bad smell in a room, you can still use inexpensive and simple methods to bring a touch of freshness to the environment, using the 26 tips above.
Featured Image Credit: Scott-lee, Shutterstock
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