On the occasion of National Pet Day, this blog is about functional beauty in your home with pets. One of the important rules of blogging is to “stay in your lane.” Blog about things in your niche. I have a design business, so I have have chosen to write about design, and functional beauty. This is where the puppy comes in.
We had a beautiful golden doodle named Samantha Jones (yes Sex in the City), who passed away suddenly at the age of 12. Incidentally, it was the night before we took our youngest away to university. The loss and the gap in our lives was immense and this is how we ended up with a puppy a few months later.
When you have had a dog for a long time, they usually just fit into your life and you into theirs and you don’t need to make any major changes. Bringing a puppy into the house requires lots of changes. Gates for example, the search for nice looking gates was not easy. This one is not bad but we couldn’t find two the same.
Lola, our puppy, was given the mud room as her puppy palace. Incidentally this room is bigger than my office, so guess who is winning at real estate around here?
Lola seems to have a lot of dog beds as well. Sammy never had a dog bed, she just slept where ever she was comfortable. Lola has several, and it was challenging to find ones that did not conflict with the decor.
As puppies go, Lola is a very good one. She had few accidents in the house at the beginning and is quite a good listener. She is calm and well behaved for the most part.
But this is where we get back to functional beauty. When you have a puppy that eats things you need to adjust. My paperwork and recipes are carefully stored as she has eaten a cheque made out to me and a recipe I left on the island.
Our laundry is on the second floor so I used to have a habit of putting kitchen laundry on the stairs to go up. Lola seems to have a special interest in dish cloths, so I now have a lovely lidded basket to secure laundry that is destined upstairs. See, functional beauty.
I think probably the biggest design decision we have made related to our puppy is the choice of colour for our new tiles. Doodles do not typically shed, but it seems that we got the one that does. So had to make sure when we chose a tile for a 400 square foot area of the first floor of our home, that it didn’t show Lola’s hair. And it doesn’t, so that is a big win. Again functional beauty.
But this day is really all about our pets and the wonderful contribution they make to our lives. They love us unconditionally and provide us so much joy. My day is better every day with my white shadow following me everywhere. Make sure you give your pets a special treat today!
Always
Leslie
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