House Training our Pekepoo

Question
Zoey will be 2 yrs. old in May and up until recently she has been trained.  She only uses Peepads, since when we got her she only weighted 3 oz. and now is only 4 lbs.
Taking her outside with dew on the ground was like giving her a bath, so we decided to house train. She would stay in her crate when we was not home.  That had been working find.  But, last summer she got use to being out of her crate more with the kids being out of school and we decided to try and see how she would do being out in the living room when the kids when back to school.  Started out fine, but over months we found she had been using the carpet some of the time and peepad the other. Zoey never chews on anything, doesn't bother anything.  We close off the other doors and she's got the kitchen/dining room/computer room/and living room (all connected, with no doors) to roam in.  I don't want to put her back in a crate, as we are all gone to work and school for at least 7-8 hrs. and I don't think that is fair to her.  And when she pee on the carpet we don't see it, so I can correct her if we're not there. What can we do to help correct this?

Answer
You could try putting the pee pad in a shallow cat litter box, and placing several of them around, so if she uses one, she can go to a 'clean' one if she needs to potty again. Another option, as you said, is to crate her when you're not home. There's nothing wrong with this; all she does all day is lie around (and potty on your floor) anyway. If you absolutely don't want to do that, you could put her in a puppy playpen in the kitchen, which would give her more room to move around in, but keep her off the carpet. You could also take up her water during the day.