How to Prepare Your Home for Winter Pests

Cold weather will push you inside your home. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other creatures that also want to hide away in your home. If your previous winter experiences have included mice, bugs, and arachnids, late summer and fall are your time to prevent pest infestations.

Check Your Perimeter

Take a walk around your home and look for bug-friendly homes. If you have wood stacked near your home, find a storage rack or system that will allow you to lift your wood supply off the ground. Keep it at least twenty feet from your home.

There are a lot of bugs and arachnids, including dangerous spiders and scorpions, that love dark spaces and cool crevices.

If you can bring in a bug exterminator to treat your perimeter soil once you have all the hiding spaces cleared up, you can do a lot to reduce your risk of infestation. Not only will you kill off the bugs that might try to move in, but you will remove a food source for pests further up the food chain. While you’re looking at the outside of your home, get your guttering checked. Standing water and mold are lovely homes for mosquitoes and roaches.

Check Your Cupboards

One of the challenges of knowing when to hire a roach exterminator is that by the time you see a roach, your infestation is probably pretty bad. Often, contacting the best exterminator near me and scheduling regular treatments is the best way to make sure you never see a roach.

Sadly, once a homeowner has made life friendly for exterminator roaches, you’re likely stuck with them. Even leaving a home empty for a long stretch of time won’t work. There are varieties of cockroaches that can thrive eating

• plaster
• lath
• dust
• mold

If the former resident left their trash uncovered or dirty clothes on the floor on a regular basis, both roaches and ants have probably been very happy in the space. Roaches cannot tolerate cold, so if you have a compost pile that contains coffee grounds or tea bags, the roaches that were eating well outside may well move in.

Try to put your compost far from the back door of your home If you have a compost bucket on the counter, make sure it gets emptied each day. For those who don’t compost, but have some plantings outside, getting your soil treated for bugs and putting down cedar mulch can both cut down on the risk of bugs inside and send fleas away from your home and pets.

Rodents

Speaking of fleas, if you see a mouse, you need to reach out for quality pest control Las Vegas. Mice can make you sick and have a serious impact on the health and well-being of your pets. Their droppings can increase your risk of hantavirus, they can carry fleas that can jump to your pets, and they damage your home.

One of the big challenges of having mice in the house is that they reproduce quickly. They also like to chew and can damage trim, screens and wiring.

If you notice mouse droppings and are waiting for your Las Vegas exterminating professional to come treat your home, carefully monitor what draws the mice. If you feed pets on the floor, consider using sealable metal bowls and limit the time the food is open to the air. Your pet may have their own door, which should be sealed overnight to keep nocturnal rodents, such as rats, out.

You will need to leave out water for your pet. If you put out poison to try to control the rodent infestation, be aware that mice and rats may be drawn to open water; poisons work by dehydrating the rodent. If you want to use traps instead, don’t leave them near large pieces of furniture that have low clearance. One dying mouse can crawl under a buffet or a television cabinet and make your house quite unpleasant.

Termites

Termites love wood, but they especially like wet wood. If you suffer a leak at any point in your home, make sure you get the area fully dried. Keep an eye on the outside of your foundation for termite tubes. If you have an area of your foundation where the sprinkler splashes dirt up on the foundation, put down weed block and mulch to make it easier to keep your foundation clean and dry.

Carpenter Ants

Carpenter ants can do damage to your home similar to termites, but they are happy to invade the rest of your home. While termites focus on wood, winged ants will invade your space on a piece of firewood and happily move into your pantry. They love sugar and starches and will happily burrow into a bag of sugar, a box of pasta, or a cardboard tub of oatmeal.

If you open a food container and something flies out, you need professional help. You may need to get rid of some food staples and even leave your home for a time. While undergoing this process, head over to your local home goods supply store and get yourself plastic containers to keep these pests out of your food in the future.

Spiders

Most house spiders are harmless. However, it only takes one recluse bite to remind you that many can be quite harmful. Spiders, like their bigger scorpion cousins, love dark spots.

If you store items under beds, leave room where you can get under there with a vacuuming wand to disturb the dust and take away their webs. If you store items in boxes, make sure you open the container and look before reaching into a cardboard box. Make sure that your pest control team has access to all the storage areas in your home and set up regular treatments to stay on top of the situation before it’s a serious risk.

Bigger Invaders

Squirrels and raccoons also need a place to snuggle in over the winter. Desert rats can do an enormous amount of damage to a home if left unchecked. Worst of all, these filthy critters create an environment that suits them by living in their own waste. Take a walk around your home and carefully review the trim around windows, doors and along roof edges.

Mammalian pests, from mice to rats to squirrels to bigger critters, need very little clearance to get into your home. Once they’re in, they can chew their way into other areas of your house. Getting them out may require you to hire someone who can do some live trapping. You may also need to get your attic insulation cleared out and replaced.

Las Vegas Pest Control

It can be easy to miss a gap where pests can move in. Getting them out will be much easier if you act quickly. Many pests will happily live in their own filth, so once they make their nasty nest, getting them out can be really tough. Contact Buddies Exterminating at 702-878-3998 for the help you need.