I'm a small person living in a three-floor home (with a husband, two messy young children, and a cat), and there's nothing worse than lugging a heavy vacuum up and down the stairs. This vacuum is so light, I never have trouble carrying it. This vacuum may not have the deep-clean action that the higher-priced vacuums have, but it has turned out to work perfectly well without destroying my family's small budget. It handles the cat hair and litter, the kids' (and husband's) spilled food, and the general dirt that gets tracked in every day. The attachments it comes with makes dusting easy, too - I use it on my bookshelves (containing both books and fragile sculpture), on light fixtures, on paintings/photographs, and on those pesky ceiling-cobwebs. Given the amount of time I spend every week keeping this place clean, I find myself far less tired using this lightweight vacuum than I used to be with our heavy-duty one. You may still want a heavier vacuum to use once a month for the cat hair and dirt that gets worked down into the carpet - this vacuum won't be great on that stuff - but we actually don't even have one of those, and our place still looks great and clean with our using this vacuum twice a week.