"Pet-Friendly" Flooring at Your Home

What do you do with the flooring when you have pets at home? This is the Number One question that is often asked by pet-lovers home owners today. Pets are lovable housemates for your family that makes one happy all the time. However, Man's best friend can be flooring's worst foe when it comes to toe nails scratching or urinating on the floor. All the more you need to look for a pet-friendly floor.

Here are some 2 important focus while doing your shopping for a pet-friendly floor.

Highly Scratch Resistant

Look for flooring products that are tested and proven to be highly scratch resistant. Sometimes when you pet get excited, he or she may run wildly around the home, your flooring may accidentally be scratched as a result. Scratches on wood flooring such as parquet will be unavoidable. However, if you are also a wood lover, you can look for good quality engineered wood flooring products that has protective surface layer that resist scratches. While some home owners may also look at laminate flooring or high end resilient flooring (HERF) options which is highly scratch resistant by nature.

High Resistance to Water and Easy to Clean

What happens when urine gets under the floorboard? Stench may occur when it is left standing for a slightly longer period of time. Therefore home owners need to clean and wash the flooring regularly so as to remove the stains and stench away. Constant maintenance and cleaning of flooring needs to be done especially during the initial period when your pets are not yet toilet trained.

Choosing a good quality flooring product that has high water resistance and stain resistance is therefore, highly important. Home owners with carpet tiles may need to get special kind of steam cleaning equipment to clean the carpets without damaging the fabrics. As for laminate flooring and wood flooring, as they are not waterproof; it is best to make sure you have a good quality product that have relatively high water resistant and also an experienced flooring contractor who will make sure that there is minimized gaps in between the floorboards that will prevent much water from seeping underneath the boards. 

HERF on the other hand, is waterproof in nature as it gives the home owner much ease when it comes to cleaning the urine and "poo-poo" on the flooring. HERF, therefore, has become quite popular today especially among the pet-loving home owners.

Patience is the Best Cure

Keeping pets is a long term committment. Although they cannot speak nor express their feelings openly like human being, pets do have feelings and it is the home owners' responsibility to provide a good living environment for them and to take care of them for the rest of their lives. In fact, whether we are adult or children, keeping pets make us learnt to be more patient, caring and responsible towards one another.

Do not fret or be angry when you see that scratch on the parquet floor or that urine on your new flooring. Laugh it away when the unavoidable happens. Teach your pets to be toilet trained thereafter or bring your pets outside to do their 'business'. And what about that scratch on the floor? Well, many years from now, this scratch may become very importantly memorable to you when you house pet is no longer around.