I have invested in a crate to help house train my 2 little hooligans (Staffie's, 9wks old that we kept from my bitch's litter) and they are now brilliant about being in the crate overnight (it's a huge crate btw, I think it was meant for a giant breed but I wanted them to have lots of room!!) They now consider their crate as their territory and really hate messing in it, so much so, that first thing in the morning it's practically clean - bless them!

However, they obviously don't have the same sentiments about the rest of the house and will happily poo or wee where ever they happen to be at that time if I've been lax and not realised they've woken up or something! But they are brilliant about going outside to the loo when carried out there and will "perform" more or less immediately when taken out to the garden and then given heaps of praise (my neighbours must think I am loo obsessed - I'm always in the garden requesting Beetle and Marmaduke to "go wee wee's!!)

So I guess what I'm querying is when do pups usually begin to associate all of the house as part of their domain (not just their crate) and get uncomfortable about using it as a toilet?

Hope I made sense! As you can probably tell, it's been quite sometime since I last had such a young pup!

hopefully someone more experienced will give you a general answer soon, but my experience with my little pup (14 wks) is that - and we did pretty much same as you for toilet training - she now well knows that going in garden is the right thing to do, and i think it was the treats that did that. its just a question of control & communication (which must differ from breed to breed & individual to individual) - our ruby's only just beginning to be able to physically hold on over night and it took us a while for her to 'train' us to recognise her requests to go out to the loo!

two suggestions that helped us, depending on your lifestyle: our back door & ruby's crate are in the kitchen. at first, until we were surer about her reliability re: toilet-training, we focussed the bulk of our time with ruby in there. once we & she had got used to the idea that she wouldn't go on the floor in there, than we gradually intorduced her to the rest of the downstairs. It was a pain having to miss a couple of weeks of eastenders though! also - and i know this is contraversial - we used to leave a puppy pad down by hte back door at first. the smell attracts the pup to toilet on there, so at least if they were wanting to go inside, she'd go to the back door. 9 times out of 10 someone would spot her and take her out to her proper toilet spot so we weren't actually training her to go on the pad, just using it as a way of making her go to the back door & be let out when she wanted a pee. if she did ever go on the pad we just completely ignored it, no praise attention or telling off.

have fun with them! :)