TL;DR: Use dental floss to remove command strips, by ‘flossing’ between the two bonded objects.

Now here’s something that’s really useful.

Command strips are supposed to be easy to remove – just pull down on the tab and the strip will stretch and come away. But, if you use a lot of command strips – you know this isn’t always the case. Especially if the strips are old or have been on the wall for a long time.

Sometimes, you start pulling on the tab, and it breaks. This used to be a disaster for me – I would pull really slowly, and adjust my grip so I’m holding it closer to the wall. And if it breaks anyway, I would get out a needle nose pliers to grip whatever bits of the strip was still accessible. And sometimes I would still be stuck trying to gently pry off the rest of the hook and inevitably end up pulling up a chip of paint.

It turns out, I was doing it wrong. There’s an easy way to remove stuck command strips: floss! Just get ordinary dental floss and floss behind your command hook (or whatever else you command stripped to the wall). It will cut the strip in half, and part of it will be stuck to the hook and part to the wall. The remnants are easy to scrape off – especially if you can get a grip on a corner and stretch it.

When I decorated my door for Christmas, I used a lot command hooks. When I removed the hooks, there were a bunch of strips that I had to use the floss trick on, and I think it actually took less time to use the floss than to remove them properly. (That includes removing the hooks and the residue from the door, but not the residue from the hooks. That part isn’t hard, just a little tedious.)