How to Keep Your House Clean with Dogs: Five Tips!

Love pets but love a clean home too? I’m sharing my five favorite tips for how to keep your house clean with dogs!

Our home is a happier place with pets and while I’d love to say that we’re rule-following dog parents and have taught our dog to stay off of furniture. But… the truth is our dog rules the roost! We’ve always had Boston terriers and they tend to be velcro dogs, wanting to be with us at all times. We’ve allowed them on our furniture, sleeping in our beds, and basically hanging out right with us wherever we are. The truth is that we wouldn’t have it any other way!

(More pics of our kitchen and a full source list are available in my post on our kitchen remodel

Along with all of the joys of having a dog come the dirt and the dog hair that make it a little bit more of a challenge to keep our house clean. After 20+ years of dog ownership, I’ve definitely found a few tricks and tips for living with pets while still keeping a clean (or maybe I should say “cleaner” 🙂 ) home. Today I’m sharing my five favorites with you including everything from our double doormat system to some upholstered furniture advice, a must-have mat for under food and water bowls and more! Let’s get to it! (post includes affiliate links – full disclosure statement available {here})

1. Stop Dirt at the Door

Keeping your house clean with dogs starts at the door! To help keep our dog from tracking in dirt and from getting our floors wet on rainy and snowy days, we’ve used a system of layering a bathmat on top of our larger patterned entry rug:

(more pics and details of this space are available in {this garage entryway post})

The bathmat is really absorbent so it takes any wetness off of our dog’s paws when she comes in and since it’s so easy to wash, whenever it starts looking grungy like this:

I simply throw in the washer and dryer and it comes out looking like new. And it works just as well for kids running in and out of the house with dirty shoes as it does for pets! I now rarely have to wash our patterned rug which is a good thing – it’s wool so it’s really not supposed to be thrown in the washer even though I do it anyway. It seems to have done ok being washed but it takes FOREVER to air dry. I think my two-mat system will help my patterned rug stay in great shape for a long time to come!

Another great option is to use a machine washable entryway rug such as one from Ruggable.

2. Pile on the Throws!

Keeping your upholstered furniture clean with pets is easiest if you simply don’t let them up on the furniture at all but we all love cuddling on the sofa with Hope so we have to have a plan B for keeping everything clean! That plan involves lots of cozy throws! I make sure there’s always a cozy throw or two on every piece of upholstered furniture and our Bostons have typically jumped up and cozied on in so they’re lying on a throw instead of the furniture itself.

I make sure that the throws I choose are machine washable and aren’t a loosely woven knit that their toenails don’t get caught in them. {This super soft ruched fur throw} is her fave (and mine too!):

We have lots of other cozy throws that get the job done too!

(Our pom pom throw was a HomeGoods find – {this cozy throw} is similar)

Every now and then, our old dog “Hope” bypassed the throws and nestled on into a group of pillows E.T. style (do any of your pets do this??) but 95% of the time a cozy throw does the trick!

3. Get the Mops & Vacuums That Make It Easy!

Keeping on top of dog hair is key for how to keep your house clean with dogs and I’ve got two favorite tools to do just that. The first is {this microfiber mop} that I use on all of my hardwood floors. It’s similar to a Swiffer but a bit larger and it comes with cloths that can be washed and reused instead of disposable ones that you throw away. It hardly takes any time at all to run it around our kitchen to pick up hair, dirt, and crumbs which then get sucked right up into the toe kick vacuum built into our kitchen island (but can easily be swept up too!):

(Oversized brass drawer pulls can be found {here})

The second is my Dyson vacuum – switching to a cordless vacuum is the best thing I’ve ever done for keeping my house clean! It’s so easy to get out for a quick vacuum job that I use it a ton more than I used to use my corded vacuum. I recommend {this Dyson v10} or {this Dyson v11} but also love the Shark vacuums too if you’re looking for one that’s priced lower – check out my post on Shark vs. Dyson vacuums to see which one is best for you.

The other great things about these cordless vacuums is that they can be used as powerful handheld vacuums too! I love them for getting into all of the little nooks and crannies where dog hair seems to accumulate like under the cushions of the couch and the next to my baseboards. And it’s great for reaching spots you would have a hard time getting to with a regular vacuum attachment like the top of molding over windows and the ledge above my range (which yes, somehow dog hair can find its way to too!!):

If you already have a vacuum you love and are just looking for a handheld vac, {this Shark handheld vacuum} is great! It’s small enough that you can unobtrusively keep it on your countertop where it’s easy to grab and it empties with the single touch of a button.

4. Choose Performance Fabrics

Whenever I post a photo of our kitchen eat-in area on Instagram, I invariably have a few people who say how ridiculous it is to have an upholstered piece like our banquette as part of our kitchen dining area because it would be a stained mess with kids. What they don’t know is that half the reason I DIY’ed this banquette instead of buying one is that I wanted one with indoor/outdoor fabric that would wear well and was highly scrubbable and I couldn’t find that in anything store-bought. Using performance fabrics is definitely a favorite tip of how to keep your house clean with dogs!

I used {this Sunbrella fabric that looks like linen} to upholster our banquette and it has been amazing. It definitely gets spills and stains on the cushion from time to time but I’ve always been able to scrub them out. You can even use a diluted bleach/soap mixture on Sunbrella fabric without causing discoloration! So if you have pets that are allowed up on the furniture (Hope liked to hang out with her sister on the banquette at breakfast time) or messy kids, choosing a performance fabric like Sunbrella is a lifesaver!

Sources: Capiz pendant  |  Geometric gray rug  |  Faux peonies  |  Rattan chargers  |  Large blush abstract framed art  |  Blue floral framed art  |  Pink floral framed art  |  Slipcovered dining chairs (similar)  |  Table runner no longer available
(more pics of our kitchen eat-in area and a full source list are available in {this kitchen eat-in reveal post}

Another tip is to go with slipcovered furniture. While our dogs have always tended to gravitate towards the throws on our furniture but every now and then we have a throw blanket fail:

Sources:  Chandelier (satin bronze)  |  Sectional  |  Textured white pillow cover  |  Antelope pillow covers  |  Gray textured velvet pillow covers  |  Rug  |  Pair of floor poufs   |  Acrylic coffee table (similar)  |  Coffee table tray (28″ square)  |  Black and white striped box (on coffee table)  |  Rattan chair

While our sectional isn’t a performance fabric, it IS slipcovered so if it gets dirty or stained, I can remove the slipcover to spot clean it or take it to the laundromat for cleaning. Total life-saver! We’ve had our sectional a few years now and even though it’s used daily by all of us, it is still stain free because I’ve been able to spot-clean any stains we’ve had by removing the slipcover or, on one occasion, taking it to the dry cleaner.

5. Catch the Drips

I use {this silicone pet bowl mat} under our dog bowls and it works beautifully for protecting our hardwood floors from water that gets slopped out of the bowl:

I love that it has a slightly raised edge so any spilled water stays on the mat rather than spilling over onto the floor. And it’s super easy to wash up in the sink.

So those are my five favorite tips – do you guys have any others to share?