Nature's Miracle litter treatment

This stuff is really the best invention since kitties themselves.

Nature's Miracle litter treatment

Rich and I both have sensitive noses and with three indoor kitties now, the litter boxes are working overtime. Nothing kills the horrible ammonia smell like a few shakes of the Nature's Miracle litter treatment powder. It's like someone has flipped off the "stinky" switch in your nose. Unlike other baking soda "snake oils" (snake powders?), this stuff actually magically makes the smell go away versus just covering it up.

I just changed out the litter boxes yesterday and had to make a special trip to get more because the paint in the laundry room would peel off the walls without it.

hardwood versus carpeting?

hardwood under all the carpets
All the floors upstairs and down in our new house have hardwood floors. We are trying to decide if we want to clean up those hardwood floors and use area rugs or put down new wall-to-wall carpeting (or some combination of the two).

The soon-to-be den will have some walls taken out of it any day now, so we'll need to either patch them with regular subfloor or matching hardwood. The upstairs bedrooms we have already decided to carpet and will just put subflooring up there to match heights where the dormers were widened.

So if the upstairs is carpeted, what are your thoughts on the downstairs? The office and the sewing room would be nice to not have thick carpet (which is not friendly to either rolling chairs or finding sewing needles). But then there's still the living room, dining room and den.

What are your preferences for flooring, and more importantly, why? We have five pets, one of which (Sarah) creates tumbleweeds of hair all over the house. Sarah also can't climb the stairs anymore and doesn't have the surest footing in the world, so we would definitely need lots of area rugs if we had hardwood floors downstairs.