This Mom Keeps a Kitchen Utensil in Every Room of Her House, and Now I Want to Copy Her

I love when items that seem randomly placed around the house at first reveal themselves to be actually quite ingenious. A butter dish in the living room, for instance, may look odd at first, but take the lid off and you’ll see it’s a clever storage box for stray trinkets or the remote you’re always losing. A lazy Susan might seem like it’s just useful for the table, but it can actually be a storage superhero in any room (or cabinet). 

I recently discovered how multifunctional one kitchen gadget could be — one I never thought could be used beyond cooking. The gadget in question? A pair of kitchen tongs, which one mom is using in every single room of her house.

There are, in fact, many more uses for tongs than I ever imagined. Don’t believe me? Take it from the mother of content creator Astrea Campbell-Cobb. In a video, Campbell-Cobb has her mom show off her tong collection. She’s got tongs in the kitchen (for their usual uses, but also for picking up dropped items like avocados without having to bend over), small and large tongs by the fireplace for picking up firewood and firestarter, and “travel tongs,” she takes with her on the go. 

It doesn’t end there. In a second video, she shows off tongs with a loop added to the bottom, so they can be hung on a wall hook and used to grab items from high shelves. She’s also got tongs in the bedrooms, tongs in the trunk that she occasionally brings to the grocery store, tongs in her art studio, and tongs to help her feed her chickens without getting pecked. The tong possibilities are endless, it seems. 

As the comments show, Campbell-Cobb’s mom isn’t the only one regularly utilizing tongs. “I got extra-long tongs so I don’t have to bend over into my washer. My wife laughs but it saves my back and it is so much easier,“ one person wrote. “I had a very bad back injury once while living alone and tongs saved my life,” said another. 

This just goes to show that while having tongs in every room may seem a bit silly, they can be a genuinely useful tool to have around — especially for accessibility needs. Even if you don’t have a bad back, or aren’t contending with aging in place, you might appreciate having a pair of tongs to get something out of that super-high cabinet (no more having to climb on a countertop to reach!). Any pair of tongs will do, as long as they work for you.