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The joy and happiness pets bring to a household far outweigh the messes they make or the value of personal belongings they destroy. That said, there are ways for animals and humans to cohabit more neatly.

The March issue of Country Home has the following suggestions for living with pets, courtesy of Krista Larson, owner of a vintage clothing business, as well as a Great Dane, a Great Pyrenees and a Weimaraner.

Furnish the living space with leather pieces, which resist fur and dirt.

Carpet the floors with sisal. Dirt falls right through the rough-textured rug.

Use washable paints in dark colors in rooms where pets hang out.

Display plants and collectibles above tail level.

Keep pets well groomed to reduce the volume of hair. Larson recommends the Furminator ($35 to $60 at Petco and PetSmart). To see a video of the Furminator in action, log on to furminator.com. You'll be amazed to see how much hair the gadget removes — and repulsed to think that without grooming, all that hair eventually would be floating around your house.

Also in this issue, a homeowner opts to hang three oval mirrors above the vanity in a guest bathroom instead of one large rectangular mirror. It's a nice change of pace.

The magazine also gives easy directions for repurposing a window into a picture frame:

Clean up an old single-pane window. (No need to strip off peeling paint; it adds character.) Use painter's tape and glass-etching cream to create four frosted squares on the glass, each 1-inch bigger around than the photos. Position photo corners (the little black paper triangles) on the frosted squares so that when the photos are inserted in the corners, they will be centered on the squares. Insert photos, back the glass with fun colored paper and label the pictures on the front of the glass with a dry-erase marker.

Working kitchen

If you cooked for a living, you'd want a kitchen that helped you work smart. The March/April issue of Midwest Living spotlights the kitchen of Judy Bell, a culinary manager who develops recipes at home.

Among her ideas:

Lower the counters from the 36-inch standard. Judy, who is 5 feet 5 inches tall, has 34-inch counters. It's more comfortable for her to roll pie crust and knead bread dough.

Open shelves are less expensive than cabinets with fronts and allow the cook to see at a glance what's there.

A trash can on wheels that's hidden behind a lower cupboard door comes in handy. The whole unit can be pulled out and rolled wherever it's needed, which is handy if you're sitting over at the table husking corn.