Help! My Dogs Have Fallen Off the “Housebroken” Wagon!

Hi, folks! Max here, with a guest post from one of our best friends, Susan, who’s having a little difficulty in the dog department. I’ve never had this problem, so I don’t know how to help her. When it comes to training, I’m always on the receiving end. So I’m asking all of you to help her out with some good solutions.

Thanks, Max! This is driving me crazy, and I don’t know how to stop it! What makes it worse is that I’m not sure which of my German shepherds is doing it. I have a 3 1/2-year-old 90 lb. shepherd and a 4-year-old 60 lb. shepherd, and either one could be the culprit. (That’s not them in the photo, though they look amazingly like my two sweeties. But I digress.) Here are the facts:

• They’ve both been housebroken for three years, except for the occasional accident, which might be anywhere in the house.
• The dogs are crated while we’re at work.
• I let them out as soon as I go home, opening all the doors required to get them into the fenced backyard, where their bathroom is located.
• Every few days I discover one of them has urinated in the same place on a corner of the love seat in our family room, so it’s pretty well marked, though I clean it as best I can every time it happens.
  
• We close off the area at night so they can’t get into the family room.
• We let them out first thing in the morning when they get up.
• We’ve been renovating our whole house over the summer, so the house has been in disarray and occasionally full of painters, plumbers, etc., but the urinating started before we began the renovation.
• We’re out of ideas on how to stop it.

I need your help. What can I do to eliminate this problem? Thanks for your help! S