Whether you’ve just brought your first fur baby home or you’re just fed up with the way your home is—especially with the pets running around, there are a few simple ways that you can make your home more organized.
Fortunately, you may already be familiar with a few of these techniques—or the solution is simple enough to implement, today, to help you maintain a pet-friendly house.
Without further ado, here are a few pet-friendly maintenance tips:
1. Keep the fur under control. Not only does this mean vacuuming and all of that for the hair around your house, but you can also do something about the fur on your actual pet—while it’s walking around shedding.
Giving your cat or dog a daily brush-through (outside) can help reduce the loose fur falling off of its body as it’s walking around inside.
2. Clean up a mess - ASAP. Accidents happen, especially with pets around. However, it’s important when maintaining a pet-friendly house that you clean them up immediately after-the-fact.
This can help eliminate and reduce bad odors or residue and stains.
3. Maintain their pet beds regularly. Just like us humans, pets like to sleep on warm, clean sheets—not literally, but you get the idea.
If your pet’s bed is machine-washable, this can help make maintaining and cleaning it quite easily—just throw it in the laundry! Cleaning it can also help you keep odors at bay and keep your pet healthy.
4. Invest in a quality pet vacuum cleaner. This can work wonders in eliminating pet hair on your floor and furniture around the house. You can find the best pet hair vacuums for any home here.
5. Air out your house or invest in a purifier. Whether you’re simply opening up all the windows and letting a blast of fresh air come through (and take the polluted air with it) or if you’re investing in a quality air purifier, this can be great to help keep your home environment clean.
6. Designate an area of your home to be a dog-cleaning station. Before your pup makes his or her way into your home, a “dog-cleaning station” can help you clean its paws, brush it down or give it a quick wipe down before it makes its way into the home.
Training your dog early enough in its life to enter the home and pause or stop before going in because it knows it has to be cleaned can help ease the process. If you have a very hyper dog, this might need some work!
7. Keep up with bath time. Just like your regular hygiene and maintenance routine, your dog should also take regular baths. How often? If you’re not exactly sure, you’ll definitely want to talk to your dog’s veterinarian about the frequency of bath time and what kind of shampoo works best for your dog’s fur type, race, or age.
If you don’t have time to run by the pet store, normal baby shampoo can work wonders if you’re in a pinch!
It’s also recommended to have bath time outside—if your dog is too big to fit inside the tub without making a mess—but only if the weather permits it! You don’t want to give your soaked-to-the-bone dog a bath if it’s freezing outside!
8. Also, make sure you put someone on litter box duty. This pet-friendly, clean home isn’t just referring to dogs!
If you have a cat, there is also some extra cleaning up to do! If you live at home alone (no other humans, we mean), unfortunately—litter box duty is yours and yours alone. However, if there are others who take ownership of the furball prowling around your home, you can take turns designating the cleaning of the litter box. Doing so regularly can help keep the home air healthy and keep odors at bay.
9. Think about a sofa upgrade. A sofa upgrade—like a leather couch (or fake leather)—can be a surface where the fur doesn’t easily get caught between the fibers and can simply be wiped down or vacuumed. If you have the spare cash—it’s worth it!
10. Set up a clean day. Even if it isn’t a deep-cleaning session, cleaning surface areas, wiping down tables, vacuuming the furniture and floors, and running the laundry on a weekly basis can help keep the house clean. Depending on how big your home is, this can be done more regularly if it’s quick!
We hope that these tips can easily be implemented into your daily schedule with your pet or pets.
Author bio: At PetHairPatrol.com, our mission is to find a way for pet owners to keep their homes clean and organized even when their furry friends continually shed and track dirt inside.
