Saturday, January 26, 2008

Meet "Alice"

In one of my dog-hair melt-downs, my friend Natalie asked me if it was time to get a housekeeper....of course, that's not really an option, or even really necessary (it's just the dog hair that makes me crazy....I can clean the rest of my house!). But it got me thinking about what solutions we could find to help me keep my sanity (and the dog).

So, I'd like to introduce our new housekeeper, "Alice"...

It feels a little silly...kind of a guilty pleasure...but we got a great deal on a ROOMBA IRobot on woot.com and I've gotta confess, I love having it!! It's got a scheduler, so we program Alice to clean the floors 3x/week at 2am...It moves randomly around the downstairs, manuevering around furniture, bouncing off walls, sweeping dog hair and dust bunnies up into it's little dirt bin. When it's done, it goes back to it's charging dock until the next scheduled cleaning. It also comes with a "virtual wall" that I hide by the stairs, so it "knows" not to go down the steps.

So, yeah, I've got a robot housekeeper....and I'm loving it!! I still sweep/mop/vacuum the house once a week, but this helps keep things manageable the rest of the time.....and I keep my sanity and the dog gets to stay.

...still looking for a solution for the couch....but one step at a time....

3 comments:

Don't Mess With Mommy said...

I've been coveting one of these. Do you know if it moves from hard floors to area rugs? We have tile, hardwood, & rugs. Will it set of a motion detector house alarm? (unfortuately we just got an alarm system because we know 2 families whose homes were broken into recently.) Glad things are moving forward in your journey and that you'll be able to preserve what's left of your sanity. ha ha.

Gretchen Magruder said...

It goes pretty well from hardwood to area rugs...I've only found one area rug that seems to cause problems, but the rest handle it just fine. I don't know about the motion detector, though....

Diana said...

We have one of these but it broke. Gobbled up something that it shouldn't have and now it no worky. I really liked it when it did work and with 2 dogs it's amazing the debris it picks up off the floor.

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