Housebreaking Woes About Over?

No, this time I am not talking about my three year old daughter. I am talking about our one year old Sheltie/Beagle mix, Trixie.

Trixie is a cute little dog, very curious and great with our kids. She is kennel trained, but we've had a hard time with the actual housebreaking outside of the kennel. My living room area rug was a favorite spot of hers, much to my dismay.

We realized a couple things recently:

She is very excitable when she is with the kids so when we would take her out of her kennel, we'd put her outside before giving her access to the main living area. We thought that would be enough. It wasn't because she was still piddling a short time after she got her access.

So, we started taking her back out AGAIN about five minutes after we gave her rein of the living area. We figured maybe the excitement got her bladder moving. It helped quite a bit. Made a big difference, but not quite enough.

So what did we finally do? We rolled up my area rug and threw it in the garage a week ago. We took her "smell" of all her previous piddles out of the house (that no amount of cleaner would ever fully rid the carpet of). She's only had one accident since.

I have my fingers crossed this is it. The poor little girl needed her humans to figure it out.