If you’ve ever hit your head on the top of a door frame, or picked out a large t-shirt that only came to your navel, you know the struggles of being tall in a world of averages. Everything is built for people just a few inches under you, whether it’s leg room in the back seat or the length of your bathtub, you’ve learned to cope with the cascade of minor inconveniences. But height isn’t all bent knees and slouching, you’ve got a leg (or maybe a foot) up on your shorter neighbors when it comes to your easy chore list. Here’s a list of five household chores that are just plain better to do when you’re tall.
1. Decorating for Any Holiday – Especially Christmas
The holidays are a ridiculous mess of chores for everyone, but there’s an advantage to height when the radios start playing Jingle Bells. Christmas decorating is much easier when you’re clearing six feet tall. Where most other people are going to be dragging about a step stool (or worse, a full ladder) to line their front porch with lights, the rest of us have just the right reach that anything on the first story is only a matter of stretching. This turns into a lonely endeavor when you’re the only tall person in the household, as decorating the top of the Christmas tree becomes exclusively your duty over the holidays. To avoid all of the decorating burden, choose to hang the lights and decorate the house when excitement is in full force. Then when the holiday feels fade, have a professional remove the decor and lights for you.
2. Washing Your Homes Windows
On a less seasonal note, a lot of home maintenance is worlds easier as a tall person. For example, window washing is a time-consuming chore for everyone, but less so when you’re not moving up and down and side-to-side on ladders. There’s a keen precision in how you wash and dry the window to prevent streaks and making them look worse, and you need to have a full range of motion up there to do this. At 6’4”, you don’t have to worry about doubling over a ladder to maintain this, because the whole first story of windows is within your grasp. It’s okay to be a little smug when your short friends break out the ladder, but do lend them a hand.
3. Changing Light Bulbs
The fiddly bits, like changing light bulbs or smoke alarm batteries, are some of the worst chores. If you’re not expertly organized, you find yourself unsure if you have the right style of replacement bulb or batteries, and again climbing up and down ladders to retry new types. Or, you would, if you weren’t a giant among humans. Tall people have no trouble reaching all but the highest hanging chandeliers to change light bulbs, and mercifully spend little time fidgeting with screeching smoke alarms.
4. Reaching the Top Shelf
Shelves are a fantastic way to organize your home’s decorative items and show them off to your guests, especially when you can place them on high vantage points for viewing. But from there it adds a whole new step to household cleanliness, again involving step stools or ladders to reach. However, as the resident tall person, you don’t have to worry about that. Dusting the top shelves and clearing away clutter are simple when these spots are right at eye-level. Even the ceiling fan is accessible, so the next time you turn it on you won’t be showered in scattered dust particles.
5. Tackling an Interior Paint Job
The true benefit of doing chores while tall is for the long-haul projects, like painting. As said so many times before, ladders and stools are terrible to carry around, especially in and out of rooms you’re working on painting. Fitting a full-size ladder in through a bedroom door is a job for multiple people, and you also stress potentially ripping your floor paper and exposing it to get painted on. Likewise, your ladder or stool are going to get painted and track paint with the—the whole job is a neatness nightmare. But nearly all the stress goes away when you can easily reach the ceiling of any room you’re in (unless they’re vaulted of course). The top corners where the wall meets the ceiling don’t require a ladder, and you can lay the painter’s tape with at most stretching onto your toes.
So, next time you have to hunch to get in frame for the photo or mirror, just keep in mind: your short friends couldn’t have gotten it any higher.
