Yes, get a high-end vacuum cleaner

Angela Lashbrook has followed the online recommendations for vacuum cleaners and found them wanting. The high-end brands that never get consideration in roundups of vacs are much better at sucking your carpet clean of filth.

A simple task like cleaning my kitchen or vacuuming my rugs may seem small and relatively unimportant. But research shows that feeling control over elements of one's life can help reduce stress, so is it any wonder that our generation is so attracted to the concept of home improvement? The capability to transform a chaotic environment into an orderly one can take my anxiety from a nine to a five or four; having a vacuum I don't have to fight makes my pursuit of tidiness and eventual mental peace closer to effortless.

This is, of course, why you don't see a professional cleaners or hotel mails hauling around a $100 Hoover Linx or whatever piece of crap Wirecutter recommends, but you do see them with models like the Miele Compact C2 [Amazon link] she recommends. It's currently $400 for the hard-floor model and $600 for the pet-hair model. Oof!

When my Dyson broke I needed a cheap vac in a hurry, checked craigslist, and ended up with a barely-used Sebo X1 for less than a hundred dollars. It was and is a complete revelation: just whipping it around that first golden day filled its bag with stuff the supposedly premium Dyson couldn't even sniff. It's a discontinued model, but the current equivalent is about a grand new so, haha, you cheapskates should probably just get a Miele.

Photo: Shutterstock / anjoirina