Friday Tribute: 3M Command Hooks

People need to hang things. It's just a fact of life. Be it coats, clothes, pictures, swords, or the occasional award, you're going to need to hang something up sometime somewhere. It used to be that you'd hammer a nail into the wall and hang whatever it was you were going to hang on that, but if you ever wanted to move it or take it down, you'd either have a nail stuck in your wall or you'd have a hole from where you took the nail out. It sucked.

Then there were sticky hooks. They were plastic hooks with adhesive on the back that you could stick to the wall. This way you wouldn't be putting holes in the wall and you could get hooks in different shapes and sizes, unlike nails which were pretty much in one style - long and pointy. The problem with the sticky hooks was that if you moved them you either ripped off the paint or wallpaper on the wall or you ended up leaving a bunch of sticky goop on the wall. This was always a pain in the ass to take care of in college because they'd charge you extra at the end of the year if they had to clean any residue off of the walls.

Thankfully, the wonderful people at 3M came up with their Command Strips. These marvelous strips allow you to attach hooks to your walls and then later, remove them simply by tugging on the adhesive strip. As you tug, it stretches away from the hook and the wall, leaving no residue on either. You can then reuse the hook somewhere else with a new Command Strip. Seriously, this is amazing stuff.

The house I now live in doesn't really have any place to hang things anywhere. When the last people who lived here moved out, they stripped the place of anything on the walls and painted everything white. This makes for two problems. First, we needed to put some stuff up on the walls so it didn't look like we were living in some type of insane asylum. Second, since the walls were white and residue or holes is extremely noticeable and I don't know about my roommates, but I want my security deposit back when we leave. Because of this, I think my lucky stars for Command Strip hanging hooks.

3M, today, I pay you my Friday tribute. God bless and God speed.