I Tried This $1 Trick That Promises to Keep Baseboards Dust-Free for a Month — and I Can’t Believe the Results

Whether I’m keeping up with my routine house cleaning or not (and, let’s be honest, I’m probably not!), my baseboards hardly ever get the attention they need. With five active kids and two dogs in our household, the baseboards get dirty fast. Even if the rest of my house is clean, dirty baseboards drag down that pristine house feeling. But the opposite is also true: When the baseboards are clean, the house feels squeaky clean — and I love it. I’m just not able to dust and clean the baseboards as often as I’d like. 

That’s why I decided to try a baseboard cleaning hack (from another writer’s mom) that I’ve known about for a while, but for some reason never tried until now: cleaning baseboards with a dryer sheet. 

Running a dryer sheet over the baseboards after cleaning them is said to repel dust, keeping the baseboards dirt- and dust-free for longer than other methods. Time was short for me, as always, though, so I took a little shortcut. Rather than cleaning the baseboards and then wiping them down with a dryer sheet, I used the dryer sheet itself to dust them. 

It worked surprisingly well. Something about the texture of the dryer sheet and the “stickiness” of it seemed to grab the dust, dirt, and fur off of the many planes of the baseboard. I was also able to scrunch the dryer sheet to get it into the corners near the wall. The stiff edges of the dryer sheet worked better than expected to get out that typically hard-to-reach grime. 

Next, I tried rubber-banding the dryer sheet to my Libman broom (a trick I learned when testing this method). I thought it would be easier on my back, and faster to not have to stand up. It might have been if I had just been swiping the baseboards with the dryer sheet, but since I was also cleaning the baseboard with it, I found that kneeling down, using my hands, and applying a bit more pressure to the baseboard with the dryer sheet than I was able to with the broom was far more effective. 

The best part is that, even though it hasn’t been that long since I cleaned the baseboards with the dryer sheet, the baseboards have stayed clean longer than usual. Between how well they worked to clean the baseboards and how they are actually lengthening the time between baseboard-cleaning sessions, the dryer sheet method of cleaning baseboards has turned out to be a bigger win than I thought! Next time, I might clean the baseboards with a microfiber cloth first before adding the dryer sheet’s grime-repellent coating.

Would you clean your baseboards with a dryer sheet? Let us know in the comments below!