Table of Contents
When you have pets at home, fur and hair are expected everywhere. When you have floors of hardwood, you think of how to keep them clean and free of hair and fur. While grooming your pets would mean minimizing the hair problems, still there is enough debris on the floor to make you feel like it’s a mess to be taken care of.
Keep the shedding to a minimum
To keep your floors clean of fur and hair, help your pets manage shedding. The following tips can be considered to minimize your pet’s shredding:
Regular pet grooming will help. Bathe them regularly and brush them with good quality brush so hair or loose fur will be removed. Doing so will not only help your floor off pet debris, but will also create a strong bond between you and your dog.
Regular haircut – aside from the regular bathing and brushing of hair, make sure that your pets will have a regular haircut. This should also minimize the presence of shed debris on your floors, furniture, and wherever your pets would roam around.
Train your dogs to keep of hardwood areas – if you can train your dogs to stay away from the hardwood part of your floor; that should be better. But, if you floor is all hardwood, you would not have an option but to put up with the grooming.
Healthy coats – one thing that you can also do is to feed your pet with protein-rich food to help them maintain a healthy coat. With a healthy coat, there will be less shedding of damaged or loose fur or hair.
Control fleas and lice – Make sure that you have a good flea control system. If your dogs have fleas, they will keep on scratching and doing so will also increase shedding.
You can also read more about how to control excessive shedding in sites like https://www.wikihow.com/Reduce-Excessive-Shedding-in-Dogs.
Keeping the hardwood floor clean
Even if you do everything to minimize your dog from shedding, they will shed still. Hair and fur will eventually accumulate in your hardwood floor. Cleaning it up will be time-consuming, when you sweep or mop it off, there would still be nooks and places where some hair and fur will get stuck. But it will be easier and more convenient when you use a vacuum cleaner.
Vacuum cleaners will help eliminate as much of the debris as possible. Since your floor is made of hardwood, use the hardwood floor attachment that comes with the unit. This will ensure that most of the hair and fur on the floor is sucked up. Simple, lightweight cleaners will suffice for this cleaning activity.
Make sure that when you vacuum clean, reach for all the corners and spaces under furniture. If there are cracks and grooves on your hardwood floor, reapply a sealer coat in the affected area to smoothen it up and do away with the small spaces where your pet’s hair can lodge themselves in.
Cleaning up
Cleaning after your pet’s shredded hair and fur can be a tedious task. If their furs and hair bothers you so much or if you have members in the family who are allergic to it, you will have to clean them off every now and then. Using a vacuum cleaner is a better way to clean; it is more efficient and helps clean the air indoor.
Brooms and mops
While brooms and mops clean the floor effectively, vacuums can do it with more ease and efficiency. It takes off soil and dust more efficiently. It removes more dirt and soil from hard floors, especially on grouted ones. When you use the mop, it would most often slide on the shiny floor and miss the grouts so it does not take off the soil and dust in it. It is even best in cleaning up salt and dried snow which will leave a film when cleaned with a mop.
Vacuum cleaners remove the dirt, not push it around. When there is hair and fur on the floor, sweeping it or mopping it will not remove all of it. Most often some hair and fur will be left in corners and in difficult to reach areas of the floor – vacuums remove them all.
Using the vacuum cleaner
Using your vacuum cleaner in the right way will ensure that you have cleaned your floor off fur and hair effectively. Just like any other tool, you need to use it correctly.
A traditional upright vacuum unit and the beater bar – the beater bar is intended for use on carpets; it can damage solid surfaces. Hence, if you use a unit with beater bar in it, you will damage your hardwood floors. Even if you turn the beater bar off, still the upright vacuum cleaner is not good for cleaning hardwood floors.
Hence, if you plan to get your own hard floor pet hair vacuum, stay away from the traditional upright versions. The best vacuum units one can use in cleaning up hardwood floors are canister or the backpack units. The push and pull of the upright units are unnecessary in cleaning hardwood floors; with the canister or backpack type – it is more efficient with just the swinging motion, holding the nozzle in front of you and waving it back and forth.
Do not forget to follow vacuum cleaning with wet mopping. It ensures thorough cleaning of your hardwood floors.