Clean house and cleaner air too

Even though I’ve been feeling terrible the last few days Chris and I did manage to get some housework done on Monday. He was off work, as he often is on Mondays, and late in the afternoon we decided it was time to vacuum. It was the first time we vacuumed around our puppy.

Now don’t get the wrong idea and think we live in a pig sty. We don’t have any carpeting in our house so dusting, sweeping and mopping regularly is usually sufficient. However, every once in a while it’s good to pull out the vacuum and do a thorough job of cleaning.

We had no idea how our puppy would react to our very loud vacuum.

I had a feeling she’d be ok with it as she doesn’t seem to mind when I use my blow dryer and the groomer said she was interested in their big blow dryer when she was being dried off at the groomers last Monday. Still … you just never know how an animal might react to something new so we wanted to try out the vacuum when Chris and I were both home. That way one of us could comfort her or totally remove her from the room if she started to freak out.

Turns out that she loved the vacuum. Chris started the vacuum and she went right up to it and acted as if it was a new toy to play with. She didn’t seem to mind the noise at all and was happy to watch as Chris vacuumed all of the dining room chairs, the inside of the air registers and so on.

It’s good to know that we can pull out our vacuum whenever we need to now and know that the dog won’t be upset by the noise. We just have to make sure she doesn’t bite the cord or the vacuum hose when we aren’t looking!

I’ve always found this house to be a little dustier than I think it should be … well compared to newer houses anyway.

I think it’s because we have an older furnace system - an oil furnace actually, and also because our 1927 triple brick house is made of lathe and plaster. Well the interior walls are made of lathe and plaster I mean! I’m also sure it doesn’t help that our living room dining room ceiling has had a bit of work done on it and is currently waiting for us to put up that tin ceiling I’ve been talking about for ages.

Sometime in the future we’ll think about changing over to gas heating. At that time we’ll also need to get a new furnace. I’m sure a new furnace with better filters or an air cleaning system on the furnace will make a huge difference in the amount of dust in the house!

Oh, on Saturday we splurged and got two air purifiers. Chris and I both smoke. Yes I know - we’re bad. We plan on quitting soon. We figured that the air purifiers will help with the air quality in our home too as they clean the air of dust, pollen, smoke, mold and bacteria particles. They are Honeywell Hepa air purifiers with permanent filters.

We were going to get one big air purifier, however since the air purifier should be located in the area that we sit in and smoke in most often to be most effective we figured a big one, one large enough to clean the air in a large open living room dining room would be too noisy to sit be side we opted to get two of the next size down. So we got two medium sized air purifiers. One is near where we sit in the living room and the other is at the other end of the room in the dining room.

So now our house is really clean and the air should be a lot cleaner too!

Do you use air purifiers in your home or do you have a funny story about your pet and vacuums or other cleaning equipment?