[catlinye_maker]

Get a Roomba. I never thought that it would do as good a job as it does, but it really cleans up after four cats and three messy humans. Refurbished ones are relatively inexpensive. You do have to take them apart and clean the brushes frequently, but doing so is very easy. And no clogs! We got a programmable one so that it would run at night, but if I were buying now I'd just get one without that feature; it's really very easy to set it up and start it going.

It does tend to catch up electrical cords and cat toys so we quickly police the area before turning it on. It's never swallowed something that we couldn't recover from (knock on wood.) My husband was very sceptical about it (so was I, a bit) but it works better than we thought it would. The running gag in our house is that the person who empties the vacuum after it runs gets "credit" for vacuuming, so my husband will be playing a computer game and listening to roomba run upstairs and saying how hard he's working vacuuming the upstairs.