Clean All The Nooks Of Your Bookshelf With This Swiffer Pad Trick

Bookshelves are an aesthetic way to showcase your favorite books and knick-knacks, but they're also major dust catchers. While you might have read every one of those books at one point, you're not frequently taking them down and re-reading them, which means dust easily settles on the spines and tops. And the more books you have, the more of a monumental task it becomes to clean them. Because of this, dusting bookshelves usually falls to the wayside and becomes a task you do once or twice a year during occasions like spring or holiday cleanings. But what if there was a more convenient way to clean bookshelves? As it turns out, there is. All you need is a Swiffer pad.

Rather than removing everything from your shelves and painstakingly dusting each novel or knick-knack, you can finish the chore in half the time with a Swiffer pad. And the great news is you probably already have a box of them in your cleaning closet, negating the need to head to the store to buy yet another product just to clean. Curious on how to do it? Here's how.

How to use a Swiffer pad to remove dust from bookcases

One thing to note about this hack is that it is not a deep clean. You will not be removing the books and items off your bookshelf to thoroughly clean the entire shelf and all its corners. Instead, it's more of a weekly upkeeping hack, which will minimize the dust and grime on the bookcase's outer ledges, books, and trinkets. This will not only make it easier to deep clean in the long run, but will also make your space look visibly tidier. To try this minimal cleaning hack, all you need to do is take a Swiffer pad and wrap it around your finger. Then use your finger to run it along the shelf edges, up book spines and on top of the novels, and across any knick-knacks or picture frames. 

As your finger gets dusty, wrap it around a cleaner part of the Swiffer pad, eventually using every square inch of it. This is handier than simply using a Swiffer duster, since your finger is smaller and allows you to get into nooks the duster can't. For example, you can run it across small detailed ridges on trinkets or picture frames, which might get overlooked by a fluffy duster. Try this out for yourself and see the difference.