A New Home With Pets: I Need Your Help!

Episode Title:
A New Home With Pets: I Need Your Help!

Host: Amy Castro

Transcript Note:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while preserving the original message and conversational tone.

Chapters:

00:00 This Week, I Need Your Help
00:46 Welcome to The Pet Parent Hotline
01:09 Camping Out in Our New House
02:45 Senior Pets and Stairs
04:25 Helping a Blind Pet Learn a New House
06:30 When Does a New House Start Feeling Like Home?
08:21 Cheap Temporary Pet Fixes That Actually Work
10:24 Living Through Home Renovations With Pets
12:58 Bonus: Finding the Fun Pet Stuff in a New Town
14:12 Please Send Me Your Advice

Full Transcript:

Amy Castro (00:00)

All right, friends, I need your help this week.

Usually, you call the Pet Parent Hotline because you've got a problem and you want some practical answers. But right now, I'm sitting in a very echoey bedroom in my new-to-me 1957 house on a semi-deflated air mattress with almost nothing else in the room, and I'm trying to figure out how to make this place work for me and my pets.

And I have a lot of questions.

Could I Google my problems? Yes. I could also call on my veterinarian friends, the trainers, and the behavior experts that I've had on the show. But this time, I want to know what you did, what actually worked, and maybe even what sounded like a great idea but turned out to be completely useless.

So this week, I'm calling on you for help.

Please pick up.

Amy Castro (00:46)

You've reached the Pet Parent Hotline, your lifeline to practical solutions for your toughest pet parenting challenges.

I'm your host, Amy Castro, and I'm here to help you cut through the noise and turn expert advice into step-by-step strategies so you can stop chasing your tail and start enjoying life with pets again.

Amy Castro (01:09)

All right, first, a quick explanation if the audio sounds funky today.

I'm recording this from the only upstairs bedroom in my new house that I know is clean. For now, I've got to work in this room because I'm going to have a lot of painting to do, I've got carpet to get rid of, I've got a roof that needs to be replaced, and a bunch of other projects before I really settle into the house.

Most of my furniture and most of the pet stuff is still in my PackRat because I don't want to move everything here and then just have to move it around room to room when the contractors come to do their work.

So right now, the furniture in the bedroom consists of an air mattress. And I do have a chair downstairs, so that's always a plus.

And that's kind of it.

For the next month or two, we're going to be living in this weird in-between stage where we're technically home. We've technically made it. We've arrived from our big adventure, and it still doesn't really feel like home yet. And it won't feel like home for a while.

For any of you who've done this before, you know it's hard enough to do it yourself, but doing it with pets is a whole other thing.

And as I've been trying to figure out all of this with the pets, I realized there are a few things I'd really like to hear from other pet parents about.

Not because I can't get access to expert advice. I certainly could. But sometimes somebody who's actually lived through something has that one practical tip that nobody either knows or has thought to mention.

So I've got five questions for you, plus a bonus question at the end, if I even get time to implement your answers.

And I really do want answers.

Amy Castro (02:45)

First up is senior pets and stairs.

If you've had an older dog or cat in a house with stairs, what actually helped them navigate that?

Our old house didn't have any stairs inside. We had two stairs going up to the front of the house and technically one stair going out the back.

This house has 12 steep stairs.

And I'm especially interested in practical things that you tried at home, whether it was stair treads that made a difference or a runner for traction. Maybe you eventually decided it was easier to keep your pet downstairs.

Or, as I saw in a really super cute video, I don't know if that pet actually even needed it, but I saw a bulldog riding one of those automatic stair-lift chairs to go up the stairs.

Do I need to install that for my pets?

What have you done? Did you use gates or ramps? Did you rearrange where your pet eats and sleeps? Or did you wind up carrying them?

Another cool video that I saw was of a guy working out at the gym where people said, "What are you training for?" And then it shows him going up the stairs with his golden retriever or yellow Lab. I forget what it was.

But I can barely get up the stairs myself because I haven't climbed stairs in like 20 years. So I don't see myself carrying a 55-pound bulldog up the stairs.

I want to hear what you've done that has worked.

And if you bought something that was supposed to solve the problem and your pet took one look at it and said, "Absolutely not," I want to hear about that too.

So I'm not looking for perfect solutions here. I just want to know what you've tried that made everyday life easier for your senior pet.

So that's question number one.

Amy Castro (04:25)

Question number two is a little more specific, and that is related to my blind cat.

Her name is Victoria, but she's referred to as Monkey.

She is fearless.

I can see her immediately taking a headfirst fall down the stairs or going through one of those little spindle things and falling the equivalent of half a story.

So if you've had a blind pet, or you have a blind pet and you've moved with that pet, or maybe when you first brought the pet home, please help me.

I'd really like to know how you helped them learn to navigate the new house, especially if you have stairs, a multi-level home, or just a house that has a lot of quirky spots, because this one really does.

I'd really like to know what you did to help them not only be safe but learn their way around the new house.

Did you limit them to one area first and slowly let them explore more? That's kind of where I am now.

Unfortunately, that one space is upstairs, and so I'm very frightened about the whole acclimation to the stairs.

Did you use mats or runners to give them a tactile path through the house? Or did you use verbal cues to help them figure out where things were?

I want to know what you tried.

Did your pet eventually learn the stairs? Did you supervise them every step of the way? Did you limit them to certain rooms until they got comfortable with those?

And I also want to know how long it took before your pet really seemed comfortable in these new spaces.

Obviously, that's a big challenge. And that part's really hard to find general advice for because every pet is different in that sense.

Some pets are more timid.

Like I said, Monkey is blind, but she is fearless. As a matter of fact, she was the first one to fly out the bedroom door where I have her and the other two cats closed in and head straight for the stairs, like she saw where she was going with her no eyes.

So whatever solutions you have for me, I am open to trying them because I really am concerned about somebody getting hurt.

Amy Castro (06:30)

All right. Question number three is more about the emotional side of moving.

This whole move for us humans, my daughter Kelsey and myself, and you've heard her in previous episodes, has been an emotional thing.

It was leaving the place where we ran our animal rescue. It was leaving the place where her father, my husband, died, and a place where basically we've lived for the past 30 years and, for her, her entire life.

I can only imagine what it's like for my pets because most of them spent most of their lives in the same home.

So what helped your pet settle into a new home?

Again, I do know to a certain degree what the answer to some of that is because, obviously, running a rescue, I'm bringing strange pets into a new home all the time.

But it's a little bit different for some reason with your own pets.

I think you expect that they're just going to do like you do and settle in because you're there. And I feel like some of them are not adjusting as well as others.

So I don't know what you've done.

If you put their old bed out right away, we've tried that.

Keeping them on schedules, has that worked? We've struggled with that.

Maybe you created a specific room that you turned into their room right away.

I'd really like to know what seemed to make the biggest difference.

And if you're somebody who's got multiple pets, did you have to do different things for different pets? Did you really tailor your approach to the individual pets?

Let me know what you did.

If you just kind of opened the door and let everybody run in and they found a sunny spot and they were fine, that's great. Maybe that's what I need to do.

And if you needed to do some things, then I'd like to know that.

And if, regardless of what you did, they still seemed a little bit disturbed or uncomfortable, I'd like to know that too, because sometimes I know things just take time.

Amy Castro (08:21)

Question number four is where I think some of you are going to have some really good ideas, or at least I hope you do.

What were some of the cheap or temporary fixes that made a house work better for your pets?

I got rid of so much stuff when we left Texas. Duplicates of things, triplicates of things, I gave them away. Bad things I threw away.

And the idea of going out now and rebuying things that I either threw away or that are in my PackRat makes me a little crazy.

I just can't stand the idea of doing that.

So I'm talking about the kind of stuff that you might have tried in the interim before you came around to a permanent solution.

One idea that I actually got from a listener was to get some wire dog pens. I got some 48-inch wire dog pens, strung three of them together, and made a teeny-tiny backyard so that I don't have to leash walk the dogs. I can just let them out the back door, supervised, of course.

We have bears here.

Did I mention bears?

That's going to be a whole other subject for another episode.

I've also been using the boxes that those 48-inch pens came in as gates across the upstairs entrance to the stairs to keep cats from flying down the stairs should they shoot out the door.

I'd like to know what you tried that I might be able to do in addition to those things.

Maybe you threw down rugs because your dog was sliding on the floor.

Did you have to baby-gate off certain places that you didn't expect to need to?

What did you do with your litter box?

That's going to be... I know what I'm doing with it now, but long term, I don't know where I'm going to put it. And I don't want to put it in the basement for lots of reasons.

So let me know about whatever crazy or ridiculous setups you tried with boxes, mats, steps, or furniture that maybe looked terrible but worked great for you.

That's exactly what I want.

And I have plenty of permanent projects coming along, but I need something that is going to make life work for us in the meantime.

So thank you in advance for your ideas.

Amy Castro (10:24)

And finally, question number five is for anybody who has ever lived through house projects with pets.

I've done that to a certain degree. But when I've done that in the past, I've done it where I had very obvious places where I could stash my pets.

For example, if I had work done on the house, I had an entire 700-square-foot dog kennel building I could move everybody out to.

I don't have that here.

And so if you had to do renovations or painting or have workers coming in and out of your house, what do you wish you'd known before the work started?

This house is not getting torn down to the studs or anything, but there will be a lot of contractors.

We're going to have flooring work, painting the entire house, and the roof is going to need to be done.

Which right there, right? It's not like that is going to physically impact my pets. Nobody's going out a hole in the roof.

There won't be a hole in the roof.

Well, I hope not anyway.

But the noise, things like that.

And I'm quite sure, being an old house and being one that has had, I think, based on the basement layout and the different materials down there, from stone to concrete to brick, a lot of little wonky additions put on, there are going to be some surprises.

Which is also evidenced by the fact that my floor slopes in the kitchen.

But we'll get to that in the future.

It's just like all those home-improvement shows that you watch, right? Nothing ever goes easily, especially with a house built in 1957.

Old houses love holding their secrets below the layers.

So if you've done this, whether it was an old house or just a house that needed work, what helped you?

Give me some ideas.

Was it setting them up in one room until everything else was done and then moving everybody?

Did you let them out during the night so that they could travel around and feel at home?

I'm not really sure how I'm going to do that.

Did you board them?

I don't really have a boarding place, but I could do that if I had to.

I do have the RV. I can stash them in the RV, but my cats have basically spent the last six weeks living in the RV, and I feel like they need a break from it.

But I'm not sure.

Or maybe there's a place in the house, especially with the roof work, where noise would bother them less.

If you've done any of this, what helped?

And was there anything that you worried about that ended up not being a big deal?

Because I have a lot of worries about cats getting out, dogs getting out, and just the stress of the whole thing.

So I'd love to hear both sides of that.

Amy Castro (12:58)

And then finally, because I feel like I'm starting to ramble, I do have this bonus question.

I think today is day five that we've actually been physically in the house.

I don't want my entire existence for the next two months or longer to revolve around stairs, flooring, roofers, and gross carpet, right?

I'd like to get out exploring. I'd like to have time to take a break. I'd like to get the pets out to various places.

So how did you find the fun pet stuff when you moved someplace new? Or maybe you stayed in the same place but acquired a new pet.

Was it a great walking trail or a cool park or pet-friendly patio places where you could go get an adult beverage or a coffee or something like that? Or a store where everybody loves your dog?

Whatever became part of your new routine, which was something that you and your pet were looking forward to, I want to find out what they were.

And how did you find them?

Did you find them through a Facebook group? Did you do a Google search? Did you talk to a neighbor?

And if you found something you never would have known about otherwise, I especially want to hear about those things.

Because if you found one somewhere, maybe I can find one up here in Connecticut.

At some point, I can tell you we're going to need to get out of this house.

We've been doing errands, but it's all work, no play.

Home Depot, ShopRite, checking out the grocery stores, figuring out where things are for us.

But the pets haven't had a chance to leave the house yet.

Amy Castro (14:12)

So those are my questions.

And now I am very seriously asking you to please help me.

If you have experience with even one of those things, please send it my way.

You can comment on this episode if the platform that you're listening on allows it. You can find the Pet Parent Hotline on Facebook or Instagram, or go to PetParentHotline.com and reach out to me there.

You don't even have to answer everything, and I'm not going to judge your answer.

Pick one thing that you know something about and tell me what worked.

That one tip that you swear by, the shortcut you discovered, the thing you wish somebody told you, or even, like I said, the ideas that you tried that were a complete flop.

I don't want to make those same mistakes. I'd like to learn from yours.

So if I get enough responses, I may even do a follow-up episode, if there's enough to complete an episode, and share some of your advice so other pet parents can benefit from it too.

And that's one of the things that I love about this show.

I can bring in an expert to give us guidance and research. But there's also a huge amount of practical knowledge sitting in the homes of people who live with pets every single day.

And I know this for a fact because when you all do reach out to me, it's always with something eye-opening, something that's a point to ponder, or a great little tip that I will pretty much put into play right away.

So this week, the Hotline is open, but it's open in the other direction.

Please don't leave me sitting up here on this air mattress talking to myself.

Send me your ideas, and I will see you next week.

Thanks for listening to the Pet Parent Hotline.

If you enjoyed the show, don't keep it to yourself. Text a friend right now with a link and tell them, "I've got a show that you need to hear," and ask them to let you know what they think.

And remember, your pet's best life starts with you living yours.

So be sure to take good care of yourself this week and your pets.