0SHARES

The most common annoyance with owning a pet is shedding. Every type of pet (with fur) does it! Short or long hair, it doesn’t matter, your pet will shed at some point during the year. If you have multiple pets in your household, shedding can be a nightmare when you want to keep a clean house! Here are some tips and solutions to help deal with pet hair!

Home Solutions

• Pet beds are not just for your pet’s comfort, they are a great tool for collecting hair, and they collect a lot of it! Having your pet’s own personal resting area will encourage them to rest in one spot, making hair cleanup a lot easier.
• If your pet is spoiled enough to be allowed on the couch or other furniture, good for them! However, the mess they leave behind can be a headache. Try laying down a blanket or throw if they regularly rest on the couch or your bed. There are many stylish couch and furniture covers out there as well! If you have a leather couch, you can tuck the blanket into the cushions to keep it from slipping off.
• There are many products out there to help with pet hair getting on your furniture! Clorox company makes a product called “Pet Hair Pickup Wipes” that work wonders on wiping the hair off furniture. There are many other products designed to get the hair out of upholstery of your vehicle that also is gentle enough to use on your furniture. See “Car Solutions” for some of my recommendations.
• Overall, regular vacuuming (or sweeping) will help cut down on your pet’s hair blowing around your house. Investing in a vacuum designed to help pick up all that hair will help! Even if your flooring isn’t carpet, there are many vacuums designed for tile or hardwood floors that work great with getting all that hair up!

Car Solutions

A whole market has blown up recently regarding pet hair solutions for your car, as pet hair is very hard to get out of your seats and carpet! Try taking your car to have it professionally detailed, they will charge you a special fee if they feel there is too much pet hair in your car. The last time I had my car detailed they charged me an additional $60.00 an hour to get the pet hair out! OK, so it had been a little while since I had it done, but still! Nevertheless, I decided it was time to be more proactive about not getting so much hair in my car to begin with.

• I invested in a good cargo mat for my SUV and a pet gate to keep my babies in the back of the vehicle. That way my pets were contained to just one spot in the vehicle, and I had a mat that they could sit on so they were not shedding all over the carpet and the back of my seats.
• EverCare company, famous for their lint rollers, makes a really long lint roller on a handle called the “Pet Hair Mega Roller” that is great for getting the hair off the seats of your vehicle.
• Sometimes your pet’s hair can be woven into the seats and carpet, making it hard to pick up with a lint roller, or even a vacuum. Pumice stones work really well at getting the hair out! Yes, these are the same stones you use for your feet! Just “brush” the area with the pumice stone and the hair will come out!
• I found this really cool tool recently on Amazon.com called the “Chom Chom roller”. It is similar to a lint roller but is like a brush to get the hair out of your car seats. It works really well for furniture too!

Solutions for Your Clothes

• EverCare Company makes some great lint rollers for your clothes! Lint rolling can be tedious, but as far as pet hair goes, there is not much else you can do other than washing your clothes to get all the hair off.
• For your laundry, there are some great solutions! There are “Laundry balls” that you throw in the washing machine with your clothes to help catch all the pet hair (and even lint) coming off your clothes in the wash. That way the hair doesn’t get spread around to all your clothes in the laundry!
• If the Laundry Balls don’t get all the hair out in the washer, you can throw some Wool Dryer Balls in the dryer to help finish off the job. These balls are great as they can also keep your laundry from bunching together too much and not drying well!

Solutions for your Pets Themselves

Ultimately, there are so many solutions for getting pet hair out of your home, car, and even your clothes, however, it is an ongoing problem if you are not proactive about stopping the shedding in the first place! Your pets will always go through a shedding season, usually with seasonal changes in the weather, but there are things you can do to help lessen the mess!

• Regularly brushing your pet will cut down dramatically on the hair floating around as your helping them shed a lot of the excess hair they have to lose! How often to brush will depend on the breed of pet you have. Even short-haired pets should be brushed out at least once a week to help keep their coat healthy. This will cut down on kitty coughing up hairballs too! There are many great tools for brushing them, however, the Furminator brand of brushes are my favorite!
• Bathing your dog regularly will help cut down the shedding as your helping them shed that dead coat. How often you bathe them depends on if they are indoors/outdoors and the time of year, however once a month will definitely help their coat stay clean and get rid of some of the excess hair. Unless they get dirty, you shouldn’t really have to bathe your pet more than once a month as doing so may lead to dry skin.
• Long-haired breeds usually require going to the groomer to keep up on their coat, whether it is to help blow out their undercoats properly or to give them a trim, your groomer is a great resource for keeping up on your pup’s coat! Grooming can get speedy sometimes, but there are many grooming kits available for you to try at home too, as long as you are careful not to clip your pets’ skin!
• Cats can be challenging to bathe and groom. Cats do such a good job grooming themselves that they hardly ever need you to give them a bath, however, it is still important to brush them regularly, even for the short haired kitties, as it will cut down on hairballs. If your cat is difficult to handle, you can encourage them to brush themselves with installing a vertical grooming brush they can rub against! They can be mounted to the wall at your cat’s favorite place to lounge, and they will naturally want to rub against it!

Pets are such a big part of our lives, but their hair doesn’t have to be! With a little housekeeping and low maintenance on your pets themselves, you can cut down on all the pet hair floating around, and your pet will feel better too!