Over the past year or two, I've developed a growing distaste for any product that ultimately gets thrown away. It means you are literally throwing money in the garbage. Disposable products are also harmful for the environment. So one way to save money and be more "green" is to look for every day products that you use and dispose of immediately, and replace them with something else. This is what I've done with my Swiffer.
A Smarter way to Swiffer
I'm sure the folks at Swiffer wouldn't appreciate this post at all, but too bad! This really works, and I no longer have to buy the pad thingies for my Swiffer.
As an owner of hardwood floors, I jumped on the Swiffer bandwagon with everyone else a number of years ago. We bought the Swiffer Max and the Swiffer Wet Jet, along with bottles of their special hardwood floor cleaner.
I go back and forth between my preferences for cleaning my floors. I have ceramic tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, and I find that a good old fashioned string mop works best, rather than any Swiffer. It simply has too much texture for the Swiffer heads to properly clean them.
Then we have the hardwood floors, which are in every room of the house, usually with a rug of some sort on them, although the dining room is still rugless. It will probably stay rugless as long as there's a toddler in the house. Green peas don't exactly enhance the beauty of an oriental rug.
Sometimes I vacuum the hardwood floors because it sucks out any dirt or dust between the boards. It's also easy to do, since I'm usually vacuuming the rugs anyway. Sometimes I sweep the floors with a real broom. A lot of times I Swiffer the wood floors, which does a great job of picking up the dust that seems to steadily accummulate any time your house is older than, say, 1950. We don't actually know how old our house is, but it seems to be 30s or 40s in style. The only problem with Swiffering the floors is that I've decided I don't like buying the disposable pads anymore. Disposable = money in the trash. Literally.
So here's the plan:
At Wal-Mart (or wherever you shop), you should be able to find a bag of microfiber shop towels in the automotive section of the store. The ones I bought came in a large bag of about 6 or 8, and half the towels are blue and the other half are white. I already talked about the wonders of using these towels as cloth diaper doublers in a previous post. I use the white ones as diaper doublers and the blue ones as dusting towels or Swiffer towels.
Basically, all you do is use one or two microfiber towels as your Swiffer pad. Tuck them into the pinching towel holder on the Swiffer. I have a SwifferMax, so I need to use two of them. I bet you could mop your floors this way too, and just dampen the towels with your mop solution before putting them on.
Incidentally, we were in Dallas about a month ago for a soccer game, and after dinner, we decided to grab dessert at a cute little cupcake shop near the restaurant. While my sister ordered one, I noticed that the shop's dustmop was pretty similar to mine. They had taken a larger microfiber towel and wrapped it over the head of a smaller dust mop, possibly a swiffer. There was enough excess fabric that they could gather it on top, near the base of the pole, with a rubber band. Clearly I'm not the only one who thinks microfiber is a great way to clean!
No comments:
Post a Comment