/logo2white.png Falk Schönfeld

Drilling holes without making a mess

When you drill a hole in a wall, the excess needs to go somewhere. Traditionally, you use a vacuum to suck it up while drilling, but that takes an extra hand or some helper. There are also ring-shaped adapters which go around the drill, and I've used them with varying degrees of success in the past. I've seen a "hack" to put a folded post-it note below the place where you drill, but that never really worked for me either. It is just too flimsy, I often dunked the contents when trying to take it off and to the bin. Maybe that is a Europe problem, where walls are made from bricks instead of wood and there is more material coming out. Anyway, the theory behind it is certainly sound, even if execution always seemed lacking for me.

However, today I installed a shelf above my bed, which had white linen on it, and I really did not want to get red brick dust on it, or spend the time to cover it completely. In addition, I was balancing on a super fluffy bed with an impact driver and did not have any hands to spare. I did however have an old cardboard box and painters tape sitting around.

Box taped under the hole Just tape a container below your hole

Drill holes through tape Drill through the tape to reduce tearout

Overall, this worked great. Everything drops directly into the box, no cleanup other than taking the box to the trash was necessary, and it was even possible to reuse the tape to glue the box to several positions along the wall where I wanted to drill. This solution is pretty obvious, but worked way better than any other I'd tried so far, so I thought I'd share.