Don't feel badly about keeping your pup in the pen. We kept Sophie confined to the kitchen for almost a year. The kitchen has a very large opening into the dining room, so we were lucky to find a wide-enough gate to close it off. It's a good-sized kitchen, so there was plenty of room for Sophie to walk around, play, etc. We also kept her crate in the kitchen where she slept. We were not comfortable giving her run of first floor yet(my house has three floors) because we didn't know if she would be a chewer and we certainly didn't want her getting hurt. Sophie turned out not to be a chewer, and she was also pee pad trained when we got her at 12 weeks, so we really lucked out.
We gradually gave her more freedom and every once in a while would let her out into the dining room where she would do ecstatic high-speed victory laps around the table. Then we would leave the gate open so she could come and go whenever she wanted. She wouldn't climb the stairs because she was still small and was afraid of them. Now, Sophie is two years old and she has full run of the house, all three floors of it. She does the stairs (carpeted) like a lightning bolt, she's so fast, and we pretty much trust her to behave even if she's out of sight. If she's too quiet, then of course, we check out what she might be doing, and most of the time, she's OK. Also, we put her crate away because she eventually figured out that we would go to bed upstairs and why did she have to sleep downstairs in the kitchen all by herself anyway, and she wouldn't have any of it. So she sleeps on our beds, even though she has two doggie beds in the house.
Sophie is our first dog, so we were basically operating on a trial and error basis to see what worked best. Fortunately, the transition from crate to kitchen confinement to complete freedom worked very well for us. I think you'll be fine; just remember you're confining your pup for her own safety and protection until she gets older. Good luck! |