Homemade carpet sweeper pads

My experiment with making carpet sweeper pads to fit into a name-brand carpet sweeper was met with guarded satisfaction. There are some drawbacks but I pronounced the experiment an overall success.

The pads that come with the sweeper or that can be bought separately work wonderfully but are a bit pricey and seem to be only sold at the notorious big-box discount store that is too far and too much trouble for me to patronize regularly.

My 21-month-old son loves to push the sweeper around on the carpet so I thought I'd try my hand at making some sticky pads to put in it. (May as well use free labor, right?) My original list of supplies included cardboard and double-sided tape but a quick trip to my favorite dollar store yielded only some super-cheap regular tape, the wide kind. Not to be outdone, I figured I could make this work.

I took a cereal box (never throw those away, they are so very useful) and cut out a rectangle that I thought would fit inside the sweeper (it did, exactly) and wound some tape around it. Winding the tape around it was a bit tricky at first but gets easier with practice. After the tape was applied I wrestled it into the sweeper and gave it to my son to try.

To my smug satisfaction, it worked pretty well! It picked up fairly well, not as good as the pads that are made to go in it, but good enough. The compromised stickiness along with the slight difficulty of getting the pad in and out of the sweeper are drawbacks but for a dollar you can make dozens of these things and pick up the crumbs off the carpet during those times when you don't have the energy to pull out the vacuum cleaner and run it.