<human>: Can you summarize the given text in a few sentences?

My wife and I are looking to get a cat. We have 2 dogs and one is older and mostly keeps to himself. The other is very friendly and we want to get him a friend. 

We have some concerns however. First is I have not been much of a cat person in the past. I hear all the horror stories of cats ruining furniture by spraying and scratching. We've all had friends houses that we have walked into and smelled the cat box and the furniture stinks and so on. As I have gotten older and more open minded I refuse to believe that all cats are like this however and I know most of you out there can't have cats like what I have described above or else cats would not be as loved as they are. 

The second problem we have is that my wife used to/may still be allergic to cats (she dosen't seem to have big problems at most of our friends houses who have cats) and as such we are looking for ways to "spot" or identify low-allergy cats. What can we do to keep allergies under control? Do to our Google-fu skills we know about grooming and not letting them sleep on the bed and such. What other little tricks are out there?

And the third problem is neither of us have had an indoor cat before. What tips and tricks are there to keeping them happy with dogs in the house, litter-box training them and keeping them going there if we get a kitten. So on and so forth. 

We don't really have a lot of money so a getting a breed specific cat such as the Sphynx or Bengal in kind of out of the question. 

So Reddit, what are your cat success stories?
<bot>: I have not been a big cat person in the past, and my wife is/has been allergic in the past. How should we go about getting a cat that fits us?