Top Tips for Dog-Friendly Décor

There’s nothing more exciting than bringing your gorgeous puppy home for the first time, but it’s never quite as special when they start off weeing on the carpet and chewing through your favourite pair of high heels. Whilst it’s difficult to make your home completely safe from those needle-sharp teeth and excitable claws, there are certain things that you can do to make sure your home is slightly dog-friendlier.

Choose Hard Furniture and Surfaces

One of the most important things to remember when preparing your home for a puppy is to invest in hard furniture items. It may look nice to have a leather sofa sat in the living room, but with a puppy it’s extremely impractical. You need to focus on getting some high-quality, durable furniture pieces that you can protect with foam pads and sponge sides to prevent any nibbling. There are so many gorgeous wooden furniture pieces that will enhance your home and still stay strong when the puppy is climbing all over them. You can find a great selection of durable furniture pieces at Furniture Plus Online. With a wide selection to choose from, you can rest assured you’ll find the right items for your home, without having to worry about them becoming your puppy’s new chew toy.

Avoid Breakable Decorations

Having your home decorated with beautiful vases and ornaments looks beautiful, but you can guarantee that your puppy will manage to get hold of them at some point and cause some damage. Your home will be a new playground to your puppy until the ground rules are laid, so it’s important to keep this in mind when it comes to the decorative stages. Try to remove any of your valuable, precious or fragile items from shelves and low areas that could be affected by a wagging tail or curious nose. This will simply prevent your puppy from knocking anything over or thinking they have new toys to play with. If you want to keep some of these items on display, try to position them at higher points on a secure surface that can’t be knocked at any point.

Remove all Rugs

Sometimes you may find that your puppy forgets where the toilet is, and when this happens you’ll also find that they like to go on the softest spot in the home. If you keep your puppy in an area that has no carpet or rugs then, not only will your pup be less tempted to go, but it will make your life much easier when it comes to cleaning up the mess. It’s also important to remove any rugs from the rooms as young puppies can see the tassels and fabric as a toy, something to chew and play with, and the last thing you want is for your puppy to destroy your favourite Persian rug!

Give Them a Place to Go

Throughout your home you have dedicated spaces for certain times of the day and it’s important to give your puppy a space to use too. You may let them roam around your house whilst you’re there, but when you leave the house it’s beneficial to give them their own spot to enjoy and familiarise themselves with for whenever you’re not there. Add some fun toys, food and water bowls and a bed to a certain spot in the home, many people like to use the kitchen, so that your puppy has their own space that they can retreat to whenever they need some down time. This will also help when it comes to training, as you’ll be able to reward your pup for going to their own bed and spending time in their own area, only letting them explore the house when you have the time to sit and watch them closely.