Eleven years ago, when we moved to Germany, we bought our first vacuum cleaner together. It was a hard working machine that never seemed to want to die. It’s called a Vampyr, and apparently they are just are hard to kill as the ones we all love to read about and watch on TV.

Needless to say, after we got Ayla, we really started to put it through its paces. Dog fur can be lethal to vacuum cleaners, and with all the dirt she brings in on her paws, vacuuming is a daily requirement. It turned out that while vacuum cleaners themselves are often built to last for what seems like forever, the telescoping arms and the floor sweeper thingy just didn’t match up in quality. It’s understandable since they get put up and down all the time, as well as constantly are being drug across the floor.

Once those two parts started to wear our, I began looking for replacement parts. I figured they must exist somewhere (because people couldn’t possible just toss their vacuum because a few of the parts weren’t working perfectly anymore) but I got no where. We went to department stores that sold our vacuum and asked the sales people, I looked everywhere online and I only stopped short of calling the company to ask personally — because I had no idea what I was even looking for auf Deutsch (sometimes the language barrier really puts up big walls) — but I think I might have sent an email request which never got an answer. None of them had a solution for us.

Despite all those hurdles, I never gave up hope that we’d one day get the replacement parts we needed to keep our old machine going. Eventually we just decided to buy a second vacuum which was identical to the first one and use the parts we needed to get the old one back into working order. So after putting our old vacuum through its paces daily for about 5 years, the old vacuum just refused to turn on one day and gave up the good fight. Lucky for us, we already had a backup machine handy. And the arm and floor attachment were still new enough to keep going.

This solution worked really well for the last six years (in addition to a bit of black duct tape on the floor attachment) but now that we’re moving, I was thinking that it would be really nice to have a fully functional vacuum again that isn’t held together with tape. My duct tape is wearing thin, the telescoping arm collapses on my fingers at times and I just can’t get under things with the floor attachment being in the state it’s in.

So I hopped on google and started trying to figure out what these sort of replacement parts might be called, put in ersatzteile to get started and found exactly what I was looking for on amazon. In minutes. Go figure. So for less than 1/4 of the price of a new vacuum, we are going to have a vacuum which is going to be practically new to us. I cannot wait! I think I might even hold back the replacement parts until we’re ready to move so they will be new and fresh once we get to Berlin. 😉

Once we’ve settled into our new place, we might one day splurge and get one of the newer hand held vacuum cleaners. Dyson makes some really awesome ones — and even has a special full size vacuum to combat pet hair. Our AEG has managed to hold up pretty well against it, but there are just some rugs that we had to throw away because the cat fur doesn’t come off without an hour of vacuuming — and I definitely don’t have time for that insanity every week!

We used to have a rechargeable hand-held vacuum when I was a kid, but these days, we’ve just been going with the dust pan and little hand broom method instead. I think that partially has to do with the fact that there were about 15 of them around our farm when we moved in. And the fact that most of our messes seem to require something much larger to get the job done well. 😉 It’s astounding that one dog can bring in a beach-worth of sand after just one short afternoon walk…

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