Is your house crawling with spiders, ants, and cockroaches? Although you might feel like it's your exterminator's job to take care of the problem, the truth is that there are a few ways you might be able to help. Here are two places that you need to clean before your pest control professional arrives, and why it might make the treatment more effective.
1: Inside Your House
Believe it or not, you should clean up your place for more reasons than just showing off your sweet interior design skills. Exterminators will use pesticides that are meant to stay in place to target bugs that like to travel. These formulations, also called residual insecticides, are designed to work for weeks or even months to kill off bugs that pass through the area.
Unfortunately, if your place is a grimy mess, these poisons can get moved around when you decide to tidy up later. To make your pesticide treatment effective, make sure to clean up these areas:
- Cupboards: Have you ever found silverfish or cockroaches roaming around under your sinks? Clear out cleaning products, plates, cups, and anything else you have in your cupboards so that exterminators can spray the entire space.
- Bedding: If you have a problem with bed bugs, you will want to remove all of your bedding. Make sure to take off your bed skirt in addition to your comforter, sheets, and pillowcases. By removing your bedding, your exterminator can treat your bare mattresses and your entire bed frame.
- Furniture: Go through your entire house, and pull furniture away from the walls. Remove any dropped objects behind your beds, sofas, and side tables, so that your professional can get to those baseboards.
- Vacuum and Mop: If insecticides are sprayed over the top of dust-covered carpet or a messy kitchen floor, they won't stay in place for very long. However, if you vacuum and mop your entire place carefully, those poisons will be able to stick to the surface for a lot longer. Make sure to use the attachment wand that comes with your vacuum, and try to tackle every nook and cranny.
In addition to giving those pesticides a better chance of working, cleaning up your place might also make your exterminator's job a lot easier. When he or she doesn't have to stop constantly to move furniture around or deal with stacks of papers, they might be able to get the job done faster and avoid damaging your belongings.
2: Around Your Yard
As you landscape your yard, you might be more interested in covering up that unsightly foundation than you are about keeping bugs away from your house. Unfortunately, the same gorgeous ivy that makes your home look like a storybook cottage might also be making it easy for pests to enter into your home. Here are a few different places that you need to tidy up around your yard:
- Trim the Edges: Trim back tall weeds and grasses around the edges of your yard, which might be hard to tackle with a lawnmower.
- Pull Down Vines: Those vines covering your house could be acting as a highway for bugs and rodents who want to enter your second story windows, attic areas, or upstairs patio. Pull down vines that are close to areas where bugs could be entering, so that your warm home is less of a temptation.
- Prune Tall Shrubs: Pests love to hide in tall, un-kept shrubs. Take the time to trim the top, back, and sides of shrubs. If you can, try to create a gap between the bushes and your home's foundation, so that foliage isn't resting right against your house.
- Window Wells: Use a plastic rake to clear debris out of window wells, where spiders love to hang out.
In addition to helping you to spot potential pest hiding places, cleaning up your yard will help your exterminator to spray down the exterior of your house more effectively. When there is an invisible chemical barrier around your place, pests are less likely to infiltrate your home.
Deep cleaning your home and yard might seem like a lot of work, but it might help your exterminator to solve your pest problems the first time around. Visit a site like http://goevergreenpest.com/ for more information.
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