A mum discovered the true meaning of ignorance is bliss after prising open her bathroom wall to discover the source of grime.
Julia Lang-Malone had been wondering why the bathroom in her recently-rented home in Gold Coast, Australia, had developed an unpleasant musty smell.
Despite her constant efforts to clean the ensuite and mask the smell with air freshener, the odour continued to linger.
But the mum made a grim discovery after peeling back the shower panel only to find a secret stash of thousands of cigarette butts.
The stench of fags had permeated through the walls, Julia said, with the family suspecting the previous tenants were habitual smokers.
Sharing the gruesome discovery on TikTok, Julia revealed she had to take apart the entire shower frame in order to get to the cigarettes and remove the source of the stench.
Some of the butts had begun to seep through the bottom of the aluminium frame onto the bathroom tiles, she said.
"We’ve basically wrecked the whole shower - which is a bummer - to get access to the cigarettes," she told Yahoo News.
"But we didn’t have much choice because it was so disgusting and we were desperate.”
While Julia can't be exactly sure why the butts were discarded there, she suspects it was because of laziness on the previous renters' parts.
“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.”
