We’ve had an email from Kelly, asking about reusing a “Swiffer” handle:

I’m sick of having to buy Swiffer cloths so am swapping to a regular brush and mop instead. What can I do with an old Swiffer then?

Disposable branded cloths aren’t the only option for using with Swiffers and the like – there are lots of homemade alternative options, often reusing and recycling old fabric from clothes, which can be washed and reused like any household cloth.

Looking at the pictures on Google, they’re look like a pole with a flat bit on the end so I imagine could be used for various other cleaning purposes – gazing at our filthy window here, I could imagine using it to dry water stains off the glass.

The pole away from the base could be useful by itself – I remember an old thrifty decorating tip was to use wooden broom handles instead of curtain poles, I’m not sure if the Swiffer pole would work for that but maybe it would… Could the base be used as a sandpaper block when you want to lightly sand a large area?

Any other suggestions?

Since there was such a positive response to Em’s sponge scourer query, I’ll post about something I’d also worried about the gackness level: mop heads.

We’re not ardent moppers but have to change the mop heads themselves quite a lot because the coarse and often dirty nature of our floors means that after a couple of uses, they look really quite sad and/or not the type of thing you want to use when ‘cleaning’. We swap and change between using cloth mops, string mops and those new-fangled-super-dooper-cost-£3-a-time mopheads but none of them seem to be particularly hard wearing.

Any suggestions on what we can do when with them once they’ve been relegated from their rightful role?