Love Your Pet, but Not the Hair? Try These Cleaning Tips.

Whether or not your pet will be your Valentine this year, there’s no question that people love their pets. But not everyone loves pet hair. Depending on what kind of pet you have, hair and shedding can be a big problem, especially when you’re trying to clean your house.

At TruBlue Total House Care, we offer regular and one-time cleaning services that can help, but here are a few tips for removing the pet hair from around your house:

Removing Pet Hair from Furniture:

Getting the pet hair off your furniture can be a challenge, especially with microfiber materials. One of the quickest way to tackle pet hair is to use a lint roller. You’ll go through those little sheets pretty quickly, but they cost less than $5, so it’s a relatively inexpensive solution. You can also do this with tape, but we’ve found that to be much more time consuming and no more effective. It works well for crevices in a chair though! If the pet hair is really stuck, try running a humidifier to reduce the static in the dry air. You can also loosen the hair with a toothbrush or rubber glove first.

Removing Pet Hair from Bedding:

Is the pet hair not coming off your bedding, no matter how many times you wash it? Comforters are especially challenging because they take up so much room in your washer and dryer. You can also use the lint roller technique on bedding, but, for bedding, we like the rubber glove technique. Using a rubber glove on the soft comforter makes the fur ball up, which makes it easier to pick off or roll up. Some people suggest shaking out the bedding or vacuuming it, but both of those can be two-person jobs and, if you have a powerful vacuum, it won’t glide very well across a puffy comforter without trying to suck it up.

Removing Pet Hair from Carpet:

Carpet is one of the dirtiest places in our homes and, if you have pets, the hair can get embedded between the fibers among the other dust and potential allergens in your house. Once the hair is down near the bottom of the carpet, it’s almost impossible to vacuum up without additional work. Like with removing hair from bedding or furniture, the trick is to get the hair to lift up. This article from Today’s Home Owner suggests using a squeegee on a mop handle, which we think is a great idea (https://www.todayshomeowner.com/video/easy-way-to-remove-pet-hair-from-carpet/)! You can also try sprinkling baking soda liberally onto your carpet, letting it sit for a few minutes and then vacuum. This works, but it doesn’t get as deeply into the carpet, if you have high-pile carpet.