Ask The Audience: Puppy Cleanup | Home Ec 101
Ivy says:
Good morning, Home Eccers. I sincerely appreciate all the good wishes you all sent last week about my grandmother. She is, at this moment I’m writing, still alive, but weakening. If you’re at all interested, I did write a long post about the situation yesterday over at my parenting blog. Here’s a link .
Now, for my question. It’s primarily for pet owners, but parents who have potty trained a kid might have answers as well. My puppy is crated (sort of, she has a doggie playpen that’s about 3.5 feet in diameter and has space for her bed, toys, food and water bowls and a puppy pee pad) when I’m not home, but generally when I am home, she is free to roam the living room and kitchen. (I gate off the rest of the house to keep her safe.) I try to keep a close eye on her to get her outside quickly when it appears that she needs to go potty, and have pee pads down in several areas, but she still ends up peeing on the floor quite often.
I don’t necessarily need dog housebreaking tips, although if you have some surefire way to housebreak a dog quickly, I’m sure we’d all love to hear it. And I don’t need “this is why I don’t have pets” comments, I’m in no mood for that whatsoever, heh. What I do need to hear is what’s the most budget friendly/greenest way of cleaning up the messes. Here’s what I’m doing now- using paper towels to wipe up any liquid mess and then spraying the area with a vinegar/water solution to clean the area. Oh, and I have laminate flooring like Pergo in the living room and vinyl flooring in the kitchen. With solid messes, I generally grab some TP and flush the mess down and spray down the area with the vinegar and water solution.
I’m going through an awful lot of paper towels this way, but my thinking is that if I use rags, I’ll be doing a whole lot more laundry, which I both don’t have time to deal with, and seems about as expensive since we recently had a 60% electric increase plus, I’ve been using Tide lately which is spendy but worth it.
...