You Should Vacuum with a Paper Towel Tube — Here’s Why

Shifrah Combiths
Shifrah Combiths
With five children, Shifrah is learning a thing or two about how to keep a fairly organized and pretty clean house with a grateful heart in a way that leaves plenty of time for the people who matter most. Shifrah grew up in San Francisco, but has come to appreciate smaller town life in Tallahassee, Florida, which she now calls home. She's been writing professionally for twenty years and she loves lifestyle photography, memory keeping, gardening, reading, and going to the beach with her husband and children.
published Sep 25, 2018
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(Image credit: Joe Lingeman)

I love my vacuums. Yes, we have two: A Dyson small ball (the big ones are way too heavy for me to vacuum with comfortably, and was definitely too heavy for me to carry up and down the stairs when we lived in a two-story house) and a cordless that was a (requested) Mother’s Day present that has for real changed my everyday life.

They each came with a smart selection of attachments that I use on occasion to vacuum upholstery, clean up the car, or get into that fur-and-dust magnet where the carpet and the baseboards meet. But I recently came across a genius tip that will make cleaning with the vacuum cleaner even more versatile. And it involves using a tool that you probably toss in the recycling: A paper towel roll.

It just so happens that using a cardboard roll as an attachment makes mincemeat out of some of the most tedious and neglected cleaning tasks.

You can squeeze a paper towel roll onto the end of the hose of most vacuum cleaners, then use your hack-tachment to fit into tight spaces that even the narrow nozzle attachment can’t handle. It directs the force of the suction straight into the nooks, crannies, and small spaces that are otherwise really, really tricky to get to.

(Image credit: Joe Lingeman)

Your paper towel roll tube can be squeezed and reshaped to fit any number of spaces you always wished you could just vacuum. Here are a few:

  • Window tracks
  • Sliding door tracks
  • Crevices in the car, like those down between the seat and armrests
  • Chair rail molding
  • Tight areas on, in, and around desks

So save your next paper towel roll. (Or in my case, pull it from the stash of rolls I hoard for kids’ art projects and rarely use.)

This post originally ran on Apartment Therapy. See it there: You Should Vacuum With a Paper Towel Tube—Here’s Why

Where will you use it first?

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