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Home / Lifestyle

Kiwi woman’s ‘disgusting’ cigarette discovery in Gold Coast shower

NZ Herald
25 Dec, 2023 09:00 PM3 mins to read

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A Kiwi mum has revealed the disgusting source of the 'grime' that had been appearing in her shower.

A Kiwi mum has revealed the disgusting source of the 'grime' that had been appearing in her shower.

This was one of the most read stories of 2023 on nzherald.co.nz.

A Kiwi mum living in Australia has revealed the disgusting source of the “grime” that had been appearing in her shower.

Julia Lang-Malone moved into a home on the Gold Coast with her husband and children last year and had been struggling with an awful smell in her en suite bathroom.

Despite scrubbing it over and over again, the stench kept returning - and then she made a grim discovery.

Lang-Malone found a stash of “thousands” of cigarette butts hidden behind the shower frame panels.

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The previous tenants were smokers, and the smell of nicotine was embedded in the walls and carpets of the house.

The whole shower had to be taken apart to gain access to the cigarette butts, which were also found to be seeping out onto the bathroom tiles due to a hole at the bottom of the aluminium frame.

A Kiwi mum has revealed the disgusting source of the 'grime' that had been appearing in her shower.
A Kiwi mum has revealed the disgusting source of the 'grime' that had been appearing in her shower.

Lang-Malone was stunned by the extent of the damage and called it “laziness” on the part of the previous tenants.

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“This b***h was dumping her cigarettes into this little square here [the top of the hollow shower frame] so we now have an unlimited stash of cigarette butts in this thing.”

“It’s really, really stinky,” she said via Yahoo News. “We’ve basically wrecked the whole shower — which is a bummer — to get access to the cigarettes, but we didn’t have much choice because it was so disgusting and we were desperate.”

“What’s most annoying is there’s a balcony two steps from the ensuite, but they’ve got thousands of cigarettes in the bathroom.”

“They smoked in the whole house. All the carpet from the stairs to the second floor has turned green from nicotine and you can see it used to be blue,” she continued.

“All the woodwork in the house was yellow, the toilet was stained yellow, there’s nicotine dripping down the walls. I’ve never seen anything like it. And there’s cigarettes burns in the carpet in the master bedroom.”

A view from the top of the hollow frame.
A view from the top of the hollow frame.

Lang-Malone told Yahoo that the smell is “unfathomable” due to her disturbing “all of the gunk in there”.

“It’s really, really stinky,” she said. “We’ve basically wrecked the whole shower — which is a bummer — to get access to the cigarettes, but we didn’t have much choice because it was so disgusting and we were desperate.”

She revealed the family had plans to stay in the home and now faced having to remove the glass panels to clear out the mess.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to just gut it and put a shower curtain in or something... I want to do it right.”

- Additional reporting: NZ Herald

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