I Regret Having This Dust-Magnet Feature in My Townhome — Until I Found This Easy $65 Fix

Once upon a time, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell declared, “There ain’t no mountain high enough.” But when it comes to ceilings, my wife Linda and I discovered, there is “high enough” — and that would be 20 feet. That’s because we moved into a condo with extra-high ceilings and found two problems: that there was a lot of empty space to fill, and that we had absolutely zero idea how we would get rid of the cobwebs up there. What was an airy draw to our home became a bit of a maintenance nightmare — but we finally figured out a solution to maintain them.

My wife and I sold our family home in Bergen County, New Jersey, in 2020, right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, then rented a place five miles up the road for three-plus years while deciding where to move and what type of situation we actually wanted.

We floated New York, Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina as options, and even visited Sarasota and Charleston. We checked out apartments, townhomes, single-family houses, and even full-on 55+ communities. Thanks to a suggestion from our future in-laws, a request from our daughter to live within two hours of Manhattan, and the fact that Linda and I liked the idea of a 55+ community, which offered built-in activities, potential friends, and more, we ended up buying a townhouse in a Toll Brothers community in suburban Pennsylvania.

We got to select a lot of elements for our home — everything from cabinets, flooring, and appliances to the fireplace, patio, and landscaping elements such as plants and trees. We visited several times as a pile of dirt evolved into a house and then a home. 

One aspect we loved, but for which we had no say of whether we wanted it or not, was the high ceilings. Toll Brothers’ townhomes boast 20-foot-high ceilings in key spots: the foyer and the living room. You can look down on both the foyer and living room from the loft on the second floor. The 20-foot ceilings are eye-catching, dramatic, and make each home feel enormous. 

Then we moved in and reality kicked in. How do you actually fill all that space? 

Linda and I deployed the following gameplan: Invest ASAP, in tandem with the construction phase, in our dream fixtures, and worry later about how to fill the walls. We visited a lighting shop in New Jersey and picked out two showstopping fixtures. The first, for the foyer, is a massive chandelier with 36 drop-down gold pendants that can be customized to form something resembling a beehive or DNA strand. We went with the beehive. It took two professionals several hours, working on massive ladders and scaffolding, to install the fixture and position the pendants, one by one, to our liking.

And then there’s the living room fixture. The foyer chandelier delivers the wow factor upon entering our house, but it’s more for effect than anything else. Whatever we chose for the living room needed to dominate a massive white space and adequately light the room. Linda and I agreed on a substantial black chandelier that provides a botanical flair with steel “petals” that extend outward from the center and are illuminated by six exposed, dimmable bulbs. We call it “The Spider.” Linda likes to say it’s delicate yet significant enough to make a statement in a large space. 

We love our chandeliers, and the bulbs in them are supposed to last 10 years, which is another great solution for the fact that they are both impossible to reach. 

Our chandeliers were installed, and they instantly helped fill the massive negative and empty space in our townhouse. But as we moved in, we began to notice another problem of reality. And that was dust, dust that was 20-feet high, and that would accumulate no matter what we did. 

How do you dust chandeliers? Get rid of the inevitable cobwebs? And that applies as well to the catty-corners of the walls. Well, a lightbulb went off in my head as I stared up at the growing dust problem. 

There must be a telescoping pole with attachable dusters. I drove over to The Home Depot and got help from an employee, who led me to a section devoted to Unger products. 

This particular store had every size pole in stock — except the 24-foot version I needed to reach the corners of the ceilings and the chandeliers themselves. 

They ordered it for me, and two days later I picked it up. It’s up there, no pun intended, with the best $64.96 I’ve ever spent. I can clean the beehive in the foyer by reaching up vertically, and The Spider can be accessed by extending the pole horizontally over the loft railing.

Of course, even almost two years into living in our new home, work remains to be done. We’ve filled up lots of the wall space in the foyer, but the debate continues about how to best populate the final 20-foot-high wall in the living room. But while we go back and forth on how to fill the space (Linda nixed movie posters; we’re looking at triptych abstract art or framed canvas), there is one thing that I no longer have to worry about: keeping all of our wall-art (and ceiling fixtures) clean.