Getting Your Home Ready for a New Puppy

A puppy will find the one thing you forgot about. Do the work before they arrive, because the first week is not when you want to be rearranging furniture.

Which rooms need sorting before day one?

Start with wherever the puppy will spend unsupervised time, then work outwards.

Cords are the first job. Puppies chew whatever sits at head height, and a phone charger trailing off a bench is exactly that. Tape them down or move them up.

Then get low and look at the room from about 20 centimetres off the floor. Shoes, socks, kids’ toys, anything small enough to swallow.

Check your plants too. Several common indoor ones are toxic to dogs, and moving them now beats finding out the hard way.

Close off what you can. One baby gate across the right doorway does more than puppy proofing the whole house.

Why does the smell keep coming back?

Because the liquid is not in the carpet. It is in the underlay beneath it.

Urine soaks straight through the carpet into the layer below. You clean the surface, it looks fine, and a week later the smell is back on the first warm day.

Your puppy can smell it the whole time, which is why they keep returning to the same patch. You are not fighting a stain. You are fighting a scent marker you cannot reach.

If one spot keeps coming back, it needs a proper carpet clean rather than another go with a spray bottle.

One patch dealt with properly once is worth more than six attempts from the cupboard under the sink.

Is your cleaning spray making it worse?

Possibly, if it contains ammonia.

Urine breaks down into ammonia. So an ammonia based cleaner leaves behind something that smells, to a dog, like the right place to go again.

Read the label on whatever you are using for accidents. Plenty of general purpose floor cleaners are ammonia based.

An enzyme cleaner is the usual recommendation instead. It breaks the compounds down rather than covering them with a scent you happen to prefer.

Blot rather than rub, same as any spill. Rubbing spreads it and works it further in.

How do you save your furniture from a chewing phase?

Give them something better to chew, and make the furniture boring.

Chair legs get chewed because they are there and nothing else is. A few chew toys in the rooms where the puppy actually spends time fixes most of it.

Rotate them. The same three toys stop being interesting by Thursday.

If there is one leg they keep going back to, block access to it for a fortnight. Breaking the habit beats correcting it twenty times.

Where should your puppy’s own space be?

Somewhere they can see you, but out of the traffic.

A corner of the living room beats a laundry with the door shut. Puppies settle better when they can hear people, and shutting them away makes the first few nights harder for everyone.

Keep it off the walkway. A bed in a doorway gets stepped over all evening and never feels like theirs.

Hard floor is easier than carpet for the first few months, for the reason covered above.

What does the first week really look like?

Broken sleep and more accidents than you are expecting.

Toilet training is a few weeks of consistency, not a few days. Outside after every sleep, every meal and every play session.

You will repeat yourself constantly. That is the job, and it gets easier faster than it feels like it will.