Spring is here and it looks like a sheep exploded in our living room. Leto the Large is depositing enormous clumps of hair absolutely everywhere. It’s hard to believe he still has any fur left on his body. But I can report that he definitely does. If I were more organized, I’d brush him and vacuum the house daily.
Yeah right.
In the real world I live in, that level of neatness is not going to happen. I hate vacuuming. A lot. (And Leto finds that too much brushing interferes with his important sleeping schedule.) But not too long ago, I invested in a cheap, yet effective tool to rid the floor of vast quantities of dog hair. It doesn’t pick up the dirt, but at this time of year, the hair is falling off the dogs so fast that the dirt can’t keep up anyway.
Most dog owners are familiar with old trick of scraping dog hair off the carpet with a rubber-soled shoe. At the house I grew up in, back in the days before cordless phones, there was a clean patch of carpet in the dining room where we’d pace around the carpet scraping up dog hair as we talked on the phone. And some of us are familiar with the trick of using a slicker-brush to take fur off carpeted stairs.
Using the same principles of scraping, rather than sucking hair, you can remove a LOT of hair off the floor using a rug rake. They only cost about $30 from a carpet supply store. With it, I can de-fur the carpeted areas of the entire house in about 15 minutes. It’s sort of like sweeping a hardwood floor. You just rake the carpet and the volumes of fur slurp up into the plastic tines. Plus, even the lightest vacuum doesn’t weigh less than a rake, so it’s not tiring at all. My carpet rake is officially called an "18-inch Grandi Groom Commercial Carpet Rake."
Soon Cami will start shedding too, and then it will look like an entire FLOCK of sheep exploded. Uh oh.