Danger: Here be cat hair

With two cats in the house, this is definitely a warning sign that should be hung on our front door. When we bought our cats we were told they were domestic short hairs which we, naively, thought meant they wouldn’t shed much.

How wrong were we? Let’s put it this way – VERY wrong, which is why I like this cat hair removal tip from LifeHacker Australia.

Basically (for those people who don’t want to click the link and leave my site!) the tip suggests rubbing sofas, rugs, car seats etc with rubber gloves to remove cat hair.

Sticky tape versus rubber gloves

Normally I use sticky tape to ‘suck up’ cat hair from the sofa but it isn’t very effective and it is time consuming. So since I had a pair of spare, clean dishwashing gloves under the sink and 1/2 hour to kill this morning I gave this tip a go. The results were amazing – this photo shows a small amount of the hair I collected in only 15 mins.

(ok, that is obviously a picture of my cats. I decided the cat hairball was a bit too gross to put online)

The LifeHacker site says the hair should stick to the gloves and can be removed by washing the gloves but I found the hair clumped and stayed on the sofa.

Sticky tape collected most of the hair and in future I’ll probably use the vacuum cleaner to get rid of all the clumped hair quickly and easily.

Rubber is not my favourite smell

The other downside is the gloves heat up quite quickly and your hands can end up smelling like rubber (well mine did, you might have better quality gloves!)
Still, a very good tip which worked just as well on the Turkish rugs and the quilt cover – definitely a keeper.

Do you have any other tips for removing cat hair from your furniture? Have you tried this tip? How did it work for you?

How about a tip for removing the smell of rubber from your hands??