Cat Hair Removal: Floors & Furniture Edition
April 19, 2015 3:17 PM   Subscribe

What tools/products do you use to get cat hair off your furniture and linoleum floors? BunnyCat's fur is extra sticky or something because it takes a LOT of effort to get her hair off my fabric couch and chairs and the crappy plastic baseboards that are everywhere in my apartment. Lint rollers and my vacuum can't handle the density of it all anymore. What's the next step? Bonus points if your method can get cat hair out of a velour papasan cushion!
posted by Hermione Granger to Home & Garden (14 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I use duct tape.
posted by DMelanogaster at 3:28 PM on April 19, 2015


Okay, so you need to be careful with this if your fabric is delicate, but I use a wire cat brush. I brush the carpet, the furniture, the cats, the bedspread...anything.

It works like magic.
posted by guster4lovers at 3:28 PM on April 19, 2015


Have you tried a rubber pet hair remover brush? They're washable and basically indestructible, so no need to replace them like lint rollers.
posted by skybluepink at 3:30 PM on April 19, 2015 [4 favorites]


I toss things in my clothes dryer and it magically removes all the fur.
This will work for cushion covers, throws, clothes. My sofa has washable covers so I wash and toss them in the dryer as well.

As for the rest of the house? I don't know i vacuum constantly and my house is always a bit hairy.
posted by stellathon at 3:40 PM on April 19, 2015


The most effective method I've found for velour furniture is to use a slightly damp microfiber cloth. The cloth quickly gets clogged up with fur, but it's fairly easy to pick the clumps of fur off the cloth. For baseboards and other smooth surfaces, a slightly damp cloth of any kind is good. I save all old socks and worn out clothes, torn into rags, to use for this -- dampen, wipe, throw the furry mess away (not the cat, the rag).
posted by Corvid at 3:42 PM on April 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


For upholstery you might try one of these (a "chemsponge" or dense rubber sponge - maybe what skybluepink is referring to) I've found them at Container Store and at pet stores. They do a good job on our cat's faux-velvet/velour catbed.

For the floors I find a dry swiffer does a pretty good job of grabbing cat hair.

If all else fails - I once borrowed a Shopvac to defur a thick woolen rug, and it did an amazing job.
posted by blu_stocking at 3:43 PM on April 19, 2015


Nah, this looks most like the one I've got.
posted by skybluepink at 3:49 PM on April 19, 2015


Anything with rubber works a treat. Try a squeegee if you have on around. I've also had great success with a cat grooming tool called the Zoom Groom that works equally well on furniture.
posted by MsMolly at 4:51 PM on April 19, 2015 [2 favorites]


Pledge oddly makes a pet-hair sweeper that works phenomenally. I'm not sure what happened to mine and now they're about $20. I'm only putting off the inevitable because nothing gets close.
posted by crankyrogalsky at 5:39 PM on April 19, 2015


My bunny has annexed one of my living room chairs as her own and is about as big as a cat. I use this lint brush for hair removal and it works better than both lint rollers and rubber brushes.
posted by clavicle at 8:26 PM on April 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


Tangentially related but it saved my house. If you don't yet have a Furminator, get one. You rake out massive (like, I'm pretty sure Mr. Chubs and Fat Tony and Bobo the One-Eyed Cat are going to be bald after this) amounts of fur and there's very little shedding now.
posted by kinetic at 4:35 AM on April 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Weirdly, for our baseboards the best thing I've used are dryer sheets, like Bounce. I do a quick swipe every so often, and I think there's some sort of static !science! going on, because it's pretty good about repelling the fur for a bit.
posted by librarianamy at 4:51 AM on April 20, 2015


Seconding a Furminator! I used to brush the cats AND the furniture with mine, and it did a great job on both.

Rubber dishwashing gloves are also great.

Also, one of my friends swears by her Electrolux vacuum--she says she always wondered how other people got all the pet hair off their furniture, and then she got the vacuum and realized they all had better vacuums than she did.
posted by Owlcat at 7:56 PM on April 20, 2015


Response by poster: SO many great ideas, thank you guys for all your input! I started using dryer sheets to get the baseboards clean, rubber gloves to attack the really sunk in fur on my couch and covered chairs, and this bad boy everywhere else. My apartment is significantly less fuzzy now.
posted by Hermione Granger at 9:07 PM on May 2, 2015


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