Following on from last week’s plastic dustbins and Monday’s broken ironing boards, Philip also suggested

Brooms and rakes.

I don’t know why, but people often throw out orphaned handles and heads of various garden tools. I simply play match maker. You can’t have too many garden tools on a farm. Reconditioned tools also make great presents.

Philip’s idea is a great one – my father-not-in-law collects and matchmakes them too. I think nearly all our garden tools now are refurbished old ones.

We went through a phase a couple of years ago of having a lot of brushes (and mops) break at the bottom of the handle – so had some brush heads lying around. I thought I’d covered it on the site and someone had suggested using them to make a boot brush/scraper – but I can’t find that now so many I dreamt it — a good idea though!

I imagine an old rake could be used to make a en masse berry picker like this one by kooky chap Atomic Shrimp.

Any other reuses for old/broken brooms, brushes and rakes?

Even though we use them in addition to sponge and cloths, we seem to go through washing up brushes pretty quickly, usually because the bristles all flatten out rendering them somewhat ineffectual at reaching hard to reach bottoms of glasses etc.

We keep a couple around for “dirty” cleaning jobs, such as de-muddifying trainers, where the flattened bristles do enough but what can we do with the others?

And is there a super-invincible kind of brush that lasts longer, thus reducing our constant need to replace them?

(Photo by laeste)

As I’ve said before, we’re not cleaning obsessives in this house but when we do clean, we’re the cleaning hardcore.

Cleaning sessions usually start with the hunt for a scrubbing brush, then follow with the application of gallons of elbow grease (we bulk-buy, it’s cheaper), then end with an exclamation of “oh! I forgot it was that colour!”

We’ve got a couple of scrubbing brushes lurking under sinks at the moment, all with the bristles somewhat bent out, tired from all the exertion. They’re still quite clean though (since we tended to use a lot of water and soap with the elbow grease) so it seems a shame to through them out but their effectiveness as scrubbing brush seems to have lessened somewhat.

Any suggestions about what we can do with them instead? Or how to bring them back to life?

(Photo by sparkules)

Little brushes on sticks.

Oh you look so useful with your littleness and your brushiness.

But how? How? How can I use you again?

(Photo by Vixs)