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Bringing a New Puppy Home

If you've decided you want a dog, understand the commitment you are making and have chosen the type of breed you wish to get, your investment in time and money starts from the time you collect your puppy and bring it home. There is no such thing as a problem dog - only problem owners! If you treat your puppy right from the start you can end up with a well balanced dog with impeccable manners.

Once you have chosen your puppy from the litter the time will come to bring him or her home. This might be the same day that you first see the pups, or you may have made your choice a few weeks earlier. Whichever it is, you must have properly prepared your house for your new puppy in advance.

Preparing the House

Puppies need food, a place to sleep and toys to chew. To avoid stomach upsets you should check with the breeder on the type of food your puppy has been eating since it was weaned, and make sure that you purchase the same type. You can change this food for another brand if you prefer, but this should be done very slowly, by gradually adding a little of the new food in increasing proportions over a number of days. Otherwise you will end up with a sick puppy. All puppies should be fed a good quality puppy food to give them the best start in life.

Although it seems harsh, a crate is a great place for a puppy to sleep. Covered with a blanket it is like a den which helps her feel secure. It's also a safe place for her to be - puppies chew everything, and however much you make your house puppy safe they're likely to find the one thing that's unsafe for them to eat when not being supervised. A crate should be large enough for a bed and an area where you can have newspaper or puppy pads - 8 week old pups cannot hold their urine for more than 3 hours, so expect accidents during the night.

Puppies chew! And chew, and chew. Make sure you are fully stocked up with toys especially designed for teething pups. If you are going to be keeping your puppy in a kitchen or utility room unsupervised make sure any loose wires are taped up out of reach, and expect anything wooden to end up with teeth marks.

Bringing Puppy Home

So the house is prepared, and the day's finally arrived and you can bring her home. Remember, when you put your puppy in the car this will not only be her first time travelling, but also she'll have left everything she's ever known behind to be taken away by strangers. This combination may very well cause her to be sick on the journey, so be prepared. Have the seats (and any person's lap) covered with towels.

At the age of 8 weeks puppies are ready to leave their mothers and their siblings and start life on their own. It is just the right time when should be adventurous and ready to explore the world and to start gaining the experiences which will help them grow into well behaved companion dogs. The first few days and weeks in their new home will make all the difference to what kind of dog they will be in the future.

Starting Housetraining

After a long car journey your puppy will need to relieve itself. Take it straight out into the garden and hopefully it will perform for you. Start as you mean to go on by giving lots of praise. Although you've now started house training, remember to have puppy pads or newspaper down in the house at strategic locations (near the doors leading to the garden is best). If the puppy soils anywhere else do not scold it, but try to predict when your puppy needs to 'go' and take it to the paper or the garden before the accident can happen. Puppies need to relieve themselves immediately on wakening, after activity and about 20 minutes after eating. Usually if a mess is made in the house consider that it's because you weren't quick enough off the mark to prevent it - not the puppy being naughty.

Let your puppy explore the house. Give her cuddles and strokes, but don't restrict her. Let her be to get her bearings. Give her the new toys, and start to play with her.

Staring to interact with your Puppy

Puppies sleep - a lot. An eight week old puppy will sleep between 18 and 22 hours a day. If you have children in the house make sure they understand that they have to play to the puppy's routine, and not to theirs. Puppies have very sharp teeth and like to chew anything, and that includes fingers and toes.

If you want friends to come round and see the new puppy see how she settles in in the first few hours. If she is nervous it might be best to wait a day or so, but if she seems to be taking it all in her stride the sooner you start socialising her the better. You should find your puppy is forward and outgoing and will greet people as new playmates.

Try not to startle or make your puppy afraid - you are going to be her new family, and she needs to trust you. If she tries to chew anything she shouldn't a sharp 'no' should be enough to tell her she's doing wrong. If she continues grasp her gently by the scruff of her neck and hold her away whilst saying 'no' sharply. This is how a mother dog would behave. Puppies are very fragile and should not be smacked harshly.

The First Night

Unless you want to share your bed with a fully grown adult dog you will need to harden your heart for the first few nights. The puppy is likely to cry and whine once shut away in her crate or room, and the only way to cure it is to ignore it. If the noise gets very loud go and bang on the door, but DO NOT go in as this is just saying that you'll come when she cries. After a few nights she will understand that bed time is just that, and that you'll be there for her again in the morning. A hot water bottle and a ticking clock or radio on a talk station may help.

Vaccinations and Socialising

Your breeder might have already started her vaccination programme, or you may have to arrange the whole course. Make an appointment to see a vet after your puppy has been in its new home for about a week so that its hormones have settled down after the stress of moving. When you visit the vet you'll need to discuss a worming programme, fleas and when you can begin to take your puppy out with other dogs. Two vaccinations are normally given 2 weeks apart, and you can normally take your puppy out either one or two weeks after the second jab.

Although you won't be able to walk your puppy in areas where other dogs go, you should start socialising her as soon as possible. Up to the age of 16 weeks your puppy is most receptive to taking in new experiences than any other time in her life. So the more you expose her to at this age, the better balanced dog you'll have in future. Take her to visit friends, have young children to visit if you haven't any of your own, introduce her to other animals, car journeys, motorbikes and anything you might come across in your daily life with her.

Bringing home your puppy to a properly prepared house and giving her your time and attention during your first few weeks with her will set the scene for the type of companion animal you'll have living with you for possibly the next 15 years. So make sure you get it right from the start.

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Infusing Heart into the Hearth of the Home

"There is no reason, either in prose or in rhyme, why a whole house should not be a poem." Ella Church Rodman

With any luck, your Mother's Day weekend was as wonderful as was mine. As one day cannot hold the full celebration, the "holiday" has been elevated--in my family anyway--to the entire weekend. It starts on Thursday night and extends 'til midnight on Sunday. Extra lounging in an excusable indulgence, as is extra chocolate, extra newspaper perusing, and extra sleep.

And if that's not quite enough, in this section of Connecticut where we make our home, kitchen tours have been perfectly calibrated to Mother's Day "weekend," and so I became happily transplanted to two different towns...with a third this coming week...all in the name of "Happy Mother's Day." Call it wonderful coincidence or perfect event planning: celebrating the hearth gets to us mothers' hearts whether we like it or not.

These tours, quite spectacular in every imaginable way, go beyond the familiar house tour offered by many historical societies or trusts for historic preservation in cities across the country. They zoom in specifically on the most honored room in the house: the kitchen. Architects and kitchen designers stand for the duration of the tour, beaming with pride over the perfectly appointed rooms they have created for their clients. As they should. Most of the work is exquisite and deserves recognition.

And recognize we patrons did in full force. Attended by hundreds of would-be renovators scourging the tour for ideas, curiosity seekers anxious to see what the next-door neighbor has been up to, professionals simply checking out the competition, and HGTV and Food Network junkies by the truckloads, the kitchens on tour scratch our collective itch.

As a wannabe kitchen renovator (my oven is falling apart, my fridge door hardly stays shut and my stove is on its last leg), I had a strong desire to see what folks are doing in kitchens around my neck of the woods. Granted, Fairfield County, Connecticut can be a rather daunting neck to grasp; the most difficult part is simply getting my brain wrapped around the scope of the kitchens on tour. For we're not talking merely ripping up vinyl flooring and replacing it with hardwood here. We're talking six burner professional ranges, imported marble countertops, double Sub Zero's, handmade tile backsplashes and handpainted friezes. Copper countertops and double-wide limestone farm sinks. Trips to Europe--with interior designer in tow--in search of that perfect armoire. Or vacations spent trolling through the Paris flea market for the grandest chandelier. One of the homes undertook a four-year renovation; granted, its 10,000 square foot size required a committed team of experts in order to eventually pull it off. But its final result--impressive, certainly--boggled my mind.

Now, there's certainly nothing wrong with any of these indulgences. We can call it "protecting our investment" or "infusing our home with beauty" or "doing careful research." The kitchens on tour were, with few exceptions, veritable works of art.

And as a visual artist, I appreciate the need for transformative beauty as much, if not more than, the next person. Indeed, my need to fill my kitchen with things that I love, things that I find beautiful, is a highly motivating adventure for me. Ever in search of wonderful roosters or lamps or linens or candles: I'm almost always on the hunt.

But as I tromped through house after house, I remained inspired most by understatement, as always. By the antique and smallish house that didn't scream "Look at me!" Which spoke to me through its quietly unassuming authenticity. Of wonderful proportions, clean color and organic materials. Of beautiful, yet simple, fabrics. I like things that are gorgeous. But I like them to come at me in the same way that nature does. "The earth laughs in flowers," Emerson wrote, and certainly their beauty is inescapable for those willing to slow down long enough to fully appreciate it. But flowers don't scream. They softly persuade. They whisper "Come hither."

As I go about the initial steps towards a complete kitchen re-do, I hope I can translate my need for organic beauty to the designer with whom I will eventually work side-by-side. I hope my desire for open shelving, a rather common solution in kitchens across Europe, overrides designer's dreams of expansive (and expensive) full-scale cabinetry. I hope that my desire for a glass-doored refrigerator, one which I've held for more than two decades, is not met with skepticism by well-intentioned planners who worry that children's fingerprints and messy living habits will intrude on the assumptive need for impeccable order and cleanliness. I hope that my desire to impart my own stamp, through my collections formed over nearly a quarter century of marriage, will not be met with a "professional's" desire for something less artsy. Or for something that appeals to his or her aesthetic, rather than to mine.

For the one thing I had hoped to see more of in these wonderfully designed kitchens was the owner's handprint. Or that of their children. I would have loved to have seen a crumb or two. Or some suggestion that the owners actually cooked there. That dough was, on some days, actually rolled out on the marble countertop and that vegetables were stir-fried on one of those six burners. Indeed, the phrase "working kitchen" has evolved in order to distinguish between those kitchens which are designed to be merely beautiful versus those in which homeowners actually cook.

I'd like to think that some kitchens stand--from decades of use or from recent renovation--where roasts are basted and hearts are repaired. Where bills are paid and where lunchboxes are packed. Where we value the notion of nurturing: through meals and through conversation. With preparation along with presentation.

Few things tug at our heartstrings as do our kitchens. We have long recognized them as the hearth of the home. Let's just hope that in the real estate frenzy--as well as in the overly-consumptive age in which we find ourselves--that we keep the heart in the hearth of our homes. And that we are able to translate it aesthetically so that our loved ones can benefit. Via fabulous aromas or soothing patterns and color. Through folk art collections or through hand-crafted dinner plates. Through pottery or placemats.

For therein lies the challenge. As always. Infusing the hearth with heart.

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Cabinetry Finish: Comparing Painted VS Stained Kitchen Cabinets

Aesthetically speaking, kitchen cabinets can be dubbed as the crowning glory of the heart of your home. And their importance is not limited to enhancing Interior Design as they also play a crucial part in keeping things organized in the area thus promoting efficiency and productivity. When thinking of refinishing or replacing cabinetry, one of the major questions to tackle is whether to have painted or stained kitchen cabinets. And if this issue is what is boggling your mind right now, then read on to know the pros and cons of each cabinetry finish choice.

To start off, it is important to note why this article offers the finishing options to go painted or stained. Kitchen cabinets are exposed to the naturally intensive nature of a multi-functional environment that handles varying tasks from entertaining guests to messy food preparation and cooking. Thus it is very important to have a protective coating over the wood, which can buckle and warp with too much water or moisture. This is another important function of cabinetry finish-to protect cabinet surface while creating a more appealing look and feel to kitchens.

Painted Kitchen Cabinets

When it comes to painted kitchen cabinets, one of the great advantages that really shine out is the limitless choice you have when it comes to colors. This makes this cabinetry finish a versatile option to take. Whatever color or combination of colors you have in mind, painting can surely accommodate. So you can get the perfect looking cabinet collection to complement with your current scheme, and the rest of the decor.

Painting cabinet pieces allow you to achieve a more uniform look which creates an interesting character to the room, reflecting the stylish preference of homeowners. Because the wood material is totally concealed, variation in the look caused by the wood is minimized. This also helps avoid problems with wood discolorations. With painted kitchen cabinets, you can choose to have a solid color for all cabinet collection or get playful with a beautiful combination of colors for your cabinetry finish to brandish themes such as the gold and fiery reds of autumn, organic, neutral or festive, depending on whatever idea you have in mind.

Stained Kitchen Cabinets

Stained kitchen cabinets are the staple to high-end homes of the yesteryears. This luxurious touch makes them so appealing to homeowners today. This cabinetry finish allows for a more lavish look that makes your cabinet collection seem grandiose, for a fraction of the cost. With all-wood RTA cabinetry you can realize the kitchen of your dreams without breaking the bank.

There are many options to choose from for this cabinetry finish. Stained kitchen cabinets come in various colors to highlight the exquisite grains of the wood material of your choice. Whether it is the smooth elegance of maple, the exotic rich variation in patterns of oak, the dark beauty of maple that achieves a patina overtime, or other features of other popular hardwoods; you can enjoy all these with staining. And if in time you decide to change looks, painting over the stain would be so much easier.