Your home is supposed to provide a comfortable and safe space away from the dangers of the outside world. When unwanted bugs and insects show up, it can feel like your precious little bubble is being invaded. Do you know what to do?
5 Tips for Keeping Bugs Away
Ants, roaches, spiders, flies, moths…whatever is in your home, it doesn’t belong there. But with more than 10 quintillion insects (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) in the world, you can’t just sit back and hope they don’t come inside. You have to proactively do something about it. Here are some helpful suggestions:
1. Keep Your House Clean
If you want friends and neighbors to frequently visit your house, what do you do? You make it an inviting place to be. If you want people to stay away, you don’t make it particularly inviting. The same goes for bugs.
If your home is inviting to bugs, they’ll grace you with their presence. Likewise, if it’s uninviting, they’ll look for another house to invade. The best way to make your house enticing to bugs is to keep it clean. Here are some things you need to do on a regular basis:
- Sweep and mop to clean up crumbs and other tantalizing morsels that fall to the ground and accumulated undetected beneath cabinets.
- Don’t leave dishes in the sink. Clean them immediately (or at least load them into the dishwasher).
- Take out the trash – particularly if there are food scraps in it. (If you frequently dispose of organic matter in the trashcan, you’ll want to take it out daily.)
- Vacuum on a weekly basis to remove hidden crumbs and debris that have become embedded in the fibers of the carpet.
If you don’t have the time or interest in cleaning, hire a professional cleaning service to come out on a weekly basis. It’s worth every penny.
2.Eliminate Excess Moisture
Many species of bugs thrive on moisture. They like damp, wet environments and will proactively seek them out. You can keep bugs away by eliminating excess moisture in your home.
Keep an eye out for excessive moisture in bathrooms, laundry rooms, crawlspaces, and underneath sinks. Remove any standing water or materials that are retaining moisture. If necessary, use a dehumidifier to pull moisture out of the air.
3.Seal Your Windows and Doors
Bugs often enter into a home in the same way that people do – through openings like doors and windows. In addition to keeping doors and windows closed, make sure you properly seal up any gaps or cracks around them. This can usually be done with proper weatherstripping and/or caulk. For doors, install a steel or aluminum threshold beneath the door.
“For even better protection, combine this with a door sweep,” home expert Bambi Turner writes. “A sweep is a cheap device that can be found at most hardware stores and helps to cover the gap between a threshold and the door bottom. Choose nylon brush sweeps over vinyl or neoprene, as they offer the best protection against bugs.”
4. Use the Right Products
Cleaning your house and providing a strong line of defense is helpful, but it may not be enough. Bugs can and will find a way into your house. Sometimes you have to fight back in the most direct manner possible – with insect-killing products.
The key with insect-killing products is to do more than kill the bugs you see. If there’s one bug, there are two. And if there are two bugs, there are four. (And so on and so forth.) That’s why it’s helpful to use products that kill the bugs at the source – i.e. their colony or nest. This is especially important with ants, which come by the thousands.
Products like ant killer from Maggie’sFarmProducts.com, are awesome because the ant actually consumes the bait and then returns to the nest where it delivers a deadly dose to the rest of the colony. These are the types of products you want to use.
5. Keep the Outside Clean
Keep bugs as far away from your home as possible by keeping the perimeter of your house clear of excess foliage, yard waste, firewood, etc. Anything leaning up against your house is inviting to bugs. A clear perimeter will make you less prone to infestation.
Make Your House a Home
It’s hard to feel safe and cozy in your house if bugs are an ever-present worry. In order to transform your house into a home, get serious about this issue. Implement some of the tips and techniques discussed in this article in order that you can eliminate bugs and prevent new ones from entering.
