[Frick n Frack]

Hello,

My wife and I have tried everything possible to try and potty train these little guys. As a recap, we tried the indoor potty pad thing for about 5 months, and I've been trying to do the outside training/crate training/schedule thing since March because they were terrible at the pad and our carpet is ruined. They are now almost 11 months. Little progress has been made and I'm wondering if there is something I'm missing. Here is the schedule I've been following:

5:45am - outside
6am - feed them
7am - outside and then leave for work (dogs in crate)
11am - outside during my lunch break
11:30am - back in crate go back to work
3:30pm - come home, dogs outside
5pm - dinner and go outside
then every hour/hour and a half take them outside till 10pm (bed)

Now generally, in the evenings they can roam the living room and play while we watch tv and be trusted about 45 minutes (but only with one eye on the tv and the other on them). But after that, they don't signal and just go on the floor. They rarely have accidents anymore because I don't trust them very much and so I preemptively take them outside or crate them until the 60 minutes is up. But we don't want to spend the rest of our life counting down 60 minutes and watching them all the time, so how do we instill in them the will to hold it till we let them out every hour so they can roam the house?

I'm not even sure two dogs can be trained at once, because my little girl jumps up on the door when I take her over to it to go out, but the boy just hangs back a few feet on the leash. I've tried to bell train a little bit, but both are scared of it, and only one can do it at a time, the other doesn't learn by watching.

I'm getting very seriously upset at the lack of house breaking, and most of the times I just want to smack them with some newspaper or squirt them with water, because the whole positive reinforcement with "go potty" "good potty" treat is not working.