Living with multiple pets, a public service message

I'm tired of talking about all things nursing. I think I'll talk about pets. Specifically, how to keep your home reasonably clean with multiple pets in it. I have six cats and three dogs who all live indoors (obviously, the dogs go outside several times a day to do dog things). How does one keep a decently clean house? First and MOST IMPORTANT, clean-clean-clean litter boxes. I have four boxes and six cats. In order to not throw up due to smells (and we've all been in "cat" houses that made us want to run in horror), daily cleaning is a must. A dust buster upstairs and down keeps the litter from getting spread all over the house. I also have large rugs under each box to catch excess litter. Good premium quality food is a life saver insofar as smells are concerned. We feel our cats Eukanuba and their poop doesn't stink nearly as bad as cats who eat cheap food. It's totally worth the money. The dogs get Nutro Natural Herring. Small compact poop that we can pick up easily. We keep a diaper pail with a tight lid and pooper scooper in the back yard and treat our yard just like we do at the dog park. No dog likes to go to the bathroom in a yard that is covered in poop, so we clean it up as it comes out. We invest in high quality cat litter, use covered boxes, and clean each one every day. Next, a good quality vacuum. I have a Dyson pet hair vacuum. I use it every day. I have hardwood floors throughout the house, but have large room size rugs and they are hair magnets. One rug will fill the chamber with pet hair every single day. All of my dogs are double coated and they shed a lot. With kitties, it's a few hairs here and there and that collects at the baseboards. I run a broom around all of the baseboards throughout the house every day. I have faux sheepskin that goes over all the cushions of the upholstered furniture. The best pet hair remover for furniture is a good quality pet brush. It's got to be very thickly bristled, and if you'll run that over the furniture, it picks up massive amounts of hair. It makes sense since it's designed to brush excess hair off of the pets. My dogs also go to a professional groomer once a month. She can really thin out the undercoat and they never smell stinky. This sounds like a lot, but if you do it every day, it only takes about 15 minutes. We made a commitment to take care of these animals and I don't want to resent them for making my house a mess, nor do I want to wear hair on my clothes (those tape rollers are all over the house for the errant hair) or find dog hair in my food. If you have pets, I hope some of this helps. If not, you should. There is nothing like it, and unlike your children, they love you all of the time and don't talk back. I love my babies!