Summary: Pests are busy in the fall since they’re searching for a safe winter shelter. This blog suggests that homeowners complete 8 easy tasks in order to prevent pests and tidy up the home. The tasks are household chores that benefit the home in many ways. The discussed tasks are: keep a tidy yard, find the cracks, inspect your packages, check window & door screens, eliminate excess moisture, inspect the window & door seals, clean up each spill, and store your firewood properly. Romney Pest Control provides pest protection in every season, including fall.
Now that it’s fall, we’re ready to bring our coziest sweaters out of storage and bake some pumpkin bread (substitute this for your favorite pumpkin treat). Unfortunately, even autumn has its pest issues that get worse the longer that they’re unresolved. Pests are starting to prepare for winter by scouting out a shelter that will help them survive the freezing temperatures.
The good news is that you can protect your home by doing some basic chores and inspections throughout the season. It’s not a perfect process that will keep pests out forever, but these tasks definitely cut down the number of pests wanting to invade. With that being said, let’s discuss the 8 tasks that fortify your home against autumn pests — and tidy up the house as a bonus!
Keep A Tidy Yard
The specific yard work you do depends on the trees in your yard and the current weather patterns, so we’ll just focus on the general tasks. Step one is cleaning up the crimson leaves in your yard by raking them up. Centipedes, earwigs, and spiders love hiding in idle leaf piles and leaf litter, so don’t let the leaves sit out too long. You can either spend a couple hours raking up all the leaves from the week, or rake up the leaves every day to make it less overwhelming. Also, mow the lawn (when it’s dry) and trim back any plants touching the house. It’s difficult to prevent pests when they’re hiding in the overgrown plants!
Find The Cracks
This task is a good one to do for the sake of your house, but it’s also a major help in keeping pests out. No crack or crevice is too small for pests to sneak through. Most insects and spiders are tiny, and rodents can fit through gaps the size of a quarter or smaller. Inspect the exterior of your house for any cracks, holes, and crevices. You can line the smaller ones with waterproof caulk from the hardware store. For larger holes, fill them with copper mesh or steel wool before lining the outside with caulk. The stuffing works especially well against rodents since they don’t like how the materials feel on their teeth.
Inspect Your Packages
You might get more packages during the holiday season, but we want to encourage you to make this a year-round practice. Cardboard boxes that sit outside for a while are appealing to many pests, including rodents, silverfish, termites, and roaches. They all enjoy eating cardboard, but rodents go above and beyond by building their nests in idle boxes. A package that was just dropped on your doorstep isn’t going to be suddenly infested, so you don’t have to rush outside to grab it before the pests do. We suggest checking the outside of cardboard boxes before bringing them inside, just to make sure you aren’t accidentally bringing in any hitchhiking pests.
Check Window & Door Screens
This might sound like overkill, but it’s worth it to be prepared when it comes to pests (trust us). Before opening up your house to enjoy the crisp fall weather — if this Texas heat ever ends — check the window and door screens for new holes. When there are gaping holes and giant tears in a screen, it defeats the purpose of having one! You can patch smaller holes with extra screen material, but if a screen is more “hole-y” than usual, it might be easier to replace the whole screen. There are many helpful online tutorials for this process. It’s important to bring fresh air into your home, but that doesn’t mean pests are invited inside too!
Eliminate Excess Moisture
Like any creature, pests need water to survive. Some need more of it than others, so they seek out damp areas for their shelters. Roaches, silverfish, centipedes, and earwigs are usually found in humid, moist areas. Check all of the plumbing in your house for leaks on a regular basis, and get any leaks fixed ASAP. Also, check the drains in the sinks and showers to see if they’re draining properly. If you have a slow drain, liquid drain cleaner or a drain snake should solve the issue. For those of you in rain-heavy cities, check your ceilings and walls often for any moisture damage. Pests favor moisture-damaged structures because they’re much easier to invade!
Inspect The Window & Door Seals
This is another task that’s important in every season, and fall is no exception. The autumn rain and wind can wear down your house’s seals. After a long, hot summer, the window and door seals might not be as prepared for the incoming autumn weather. Ants, roaches, and other pests squeeze through broken or loose weather-proofing seals. When the weather is decent, inspect the seals on all doors and windows and replace any that don’t have a tight seal. Don’t forget about the big garage door! If the door doesn’t close correctly or if the seal is loose, contact your local garage door repair services to get it fixed.
Clean Up Each Spill
This one seems small in comparison to the other tips, but pest prevention is in the details! Food is a major attraction for every pest. Since many of them are so small, a food source can be anything from a cereal box to a pile of chip crumbs. Large gatherings are common in the fall, thanks to football season and the holidays. This means there are plenty of instances for a spill to go unnoticed, so you want to remove the attractant before the creepy-crawlies notice it. Use an anti-bacterial wipe or spray to clean any food-related spills. This takes care of the larger pieces and removes any sticky residue that would still attract pests.
Store Your Firewood Properly
If you need to supply your fireplace with actual firewood, you probably have a system for stacking the extra firewood outside. If you want a refresher, these are the firewood rules we go by:
- Cover with a tarp or another secure covering
- Stack in even rows
- Dispose of damp wood
- Elevate on a pallet or other platform
- Store at least 5 feet from the house
The last one is for the sake of pest prevention. Let’s say a termite colony invades your firewood (knock on wood that they don’t!). If the firewood is stored right against your house, it’s incredibly easy for the termites to crawl up to the house and begin chewing through the exterior. Do a quick scan of your firewood pile to make sure there aren’t any wood-boring insects crawling around, and only take pieces inside as you need them. Pests have no place in our fireplaces!
Contact Pest Control Services ASAP
These chores are great ways to prevent every pest from forcing its way into your home, but it’s still not an exact science. For reliable pest protection, you need professional services from Romney Pest Control! Our licensed technicians analyze every area of pest activity before providing targeted treatments that eliminate the troublemaking pests. But all of the tasks we discussed don’t go to waste! The tidier your home and yard are, the easier it is for the treatments to reach the pests. We look forward to keeping you pest-free this fall. Contact us today for a free quote on our dependable pest control services!
Citations
Gibb, T.J. (2018, April). Insects in firewood. Purdue University Extension – Entomology. Available at https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/publications/E-67/E-67.html (Accessed on October 1, 2024).
