For some reason, my pup, Mimi, won’t come down our inside stairs. She has no problems on the hard floors and she goes down other stairs fine. These stairs however are scary to her. She won’t come down them and she won’t come up them.
The other dog, Louie (housemate’s dog), does just fine. In Mimi’s defense, the stairs are quite steep and narrow compared to traditional stairs. Also in Louie’s favor, he has been climbing those stairs for 13 years and has gotten plenty of practice since our housemate used to live in our current unit.
I believe the problem is that the stairs are white and she simply can’t see the steps well enough! We think she has sight issues as she can’t see food sometimes when we toss her a scrap. If not, it has to be the way the stairs feel on her paws. Anyways, this is what worked for us on the cheap:
As you can see, the stairs are white:
The red blocks are cut from the material you can line your cabinets with for grip:
This worked just fine except… They kept falling off the stairs. Her tail would knock a few off or we’d knock a few off coming up and down the stairs. We dealt with it like this for six months or so…
…until one night she ran to the bottom of the stairs to check things out after we fell asleep. She must have heard something. She also knocked some of the red squares off. We woke up to her whining and yelping because she was ‘trapped’ at the bottom of the stairwell. So, we knew we had to make them stay on the stairs.
I bought this from Home Depot:
…and I cut out little squares about 1×1 inch:
So far, these are working great! The other dog is using them sometimes also. I had plenty left over so, if you see a smaller roll, do it.
Note: I swept, vacuumed, wiped down the stairs with Clorox wipes, and let them dry before I stuck the squares down.
Also…I have no idea what kind of residue these things will leave behind once I remove them.
gradlifetreasures 