The $20 Amazon Tool That Made My Least Favorite Chore 100 Times More Tolerable

Clean baseboards are not something I can pride myself on. At any given moment, the baseboards in my house are more likely to be filthy than pristine: They have pet hair and a film of dust on them and, (I’m embarrassed to admit) even some food splatters near our table.

But I really don’t like cleaning baseboards. There are so many small planes and crannies for dust to collect. And because they don’t quite get clean with a regular duster, getting to them means getting down on your hands and knees on the floor with a rag. Not something I tend (or want!) to do in regular cleaning.

So I recently tried out a tool that promises to simplify the awkward task of cleaning the baseboards. It’s called the Baseboard Buddy. It’s under $25, and it claims to be the “fast and easy way to clean your baseboards and moldings.”

Here’s how it works: It’s essentially a cleaning pad on a stick. At one end is a cleaning head pre-loaded with a microfiber cleaning pad (there are two more in the box, and they’re all washable and reusable). There is a screw on the cleaning head for adjusting the height of the cleaning pad to accommodate for your baseboards. You loosen it to move the pad up or down and then tighten it to keep it in place. The cleaning head swivels so you can adjust the angle of the tool for your comfort. And it’s all attached to a long handle to make it easier to reach way up or down to your moldings and baseboards.

As I adjusted the angle of the Baseboard Buddy’s swivel head to my baseboards, it was the first time I felt like there was a tool that effectively reached into the several levels of grooves in my intricate baseboards. The shape of the cleaning head combined with the length of the fibers makes it obvious that the Baseboard Buddy is carefully made for the duty it’s supposed to accomplish. Poised to “walk and glide,” as the Amazon description describes, I was excited for how easy it seemed like this usually annoying task was about to become.

However, the thing that makes the Baseboard Buddy good at what it does is also what made me slightly frustrated with it. The cleaning pad fit securely as soon as I pressed it against the baseboard, but as I began to walk and move it along, the swiveling action of the tool made me feel like I had to hold the handle just so to maintain maximum contact between the cleaning head and the baseboard. It was a bit squirrely and I definitely didn’t feel like I could just walk and glide.

Yet however much extra energy I had to exert to keep the cleaning head against the baseboard, I did find that the Baseboard Buddy dusted the baseboards quite well. The instructions say that you can use the cleaning pad either wet or dry. I found that using it wet helped not only pick up dust, dirt, and pet hair even better than the dry fibers did, but the cleaning head seemed to “stick” to the baseboard better slightly better, reducing the problem with excessive swiveling.

I appreciated how I could thoroughly clean the baseboards without getting down on the floor. The tool would be great for those whose health doesn’t allow them to bend or spend time on the hard floor on their hands and knees.

What I really liked using the Baseboard Buddy for, though, was cleaning the tops of my door and window moldings. The cleaning head didn’t swivel in this position, and the cleaning head is a perfect shape for swiping dirt and dust off a surface that’s seldom cleaned.

The Baseboard Buddy, for me, has made baseboard-cleaning convenient enough that it’s brought a chore that I neglected too often into my regular cleaning routine. And because of that, perhaps more than anything else, my baseboards are cleaner than ever.

Buy: Baseboard Buddy, $19.99 (normally 24.99)