Do you enjoy your home? Is it all warm and cozy for you while you sit in the luxury of the indoors, maybe eating a foot-long sandwich while the game is on? It does sound appealing… Funnily enough, the creepy critters that are scooting about your dwelling think so, as well. Don’t worry; you can get rid of those pests without making it uncomfortable to you, the intended inhabitant, by making it unattractive to them, the rude intruder. It’s simple enough, so finish that sandwich.

You have to make your home less like nature, so the bugs don’t treat it that way because nature is their home. The wooden landscape timbers that define your driveway or garden do not have to be made of wood. Try using plastic or concrete beams; they don’t seem like wooden log homes for you neighboring insects. As well, Instead of using wood mulch in your yard, try using rock or gravel. This is much harder to move through than wood mulch, which will make it difficult for them, thus less appealing. Maintain the length of your plants, so the bugs don’t see a bushy shrub as a nice summer home. The same goes for that wood pile next to your house. Get it away from your house! That’s practically an eight story apartment building for your currently homeless nomads of the earth. One last thing to consider, change your light bulbs from normal bulbs to Yellow Bug Lights. Your flying friends won’t see this and see a beautifully bright hangout spot.

See? It’s an easy concept, so don’t think too hard on it. Make your lovely habitat a not so lovely habitat for the creatures crawling through your door. Maybe you can finally get to the last bite of that sandwich… Before the bugs do.

Another extremely important way to prevent pests from dwelling in your home is sanitation. One good habit to practice is to vacuum regularly, at least once a week. All sorts of little creatures are roaming about your carpets and curtains, so it’s best to get there before they do. They also like to hide in clutter, both indoors and outdoors, so make sure that you always clean up your kids’ messes (and yours, too!). The best way to go about this is to simply remove any sort of junk that’s just lying around, cluttering your lawn or the interior of your home.

Where there is food, insects will find it. To keep your house from being the hot dining spot for ants and other such pests, make certain that you keep your food in tightly sealed containers. Don’t leave it lying out for long periods of time, either. If they can’t pick up the sweet scent of sustenance, they’ll keep their distance. Also, be mindful of food that’s been left in the garbage cans. You should always keep a tightly sealed lid over your trash, and make sure that your trash containers are always kept as clean as possible.

A dirty house is an amusement park for pests. If you keep a tidy home, you won’t have many unwelcome visitors!

You close a door when you don’t want something that’s outside to come inside your home. So, it would make sense that when you don’t want pests in your home, you should probably close off their doors. There are other ways to keep those pesky pests out of your home without resorting to poisonous chemicals that are harmful to you, as well, or messy traps that leave corpses all over your beautiful abode, and some of these techniques are as complicated as closing your actual door. Crazy, huh? The problem with most of these solutions is that you actually have to get up instead of having someone else do it for you. But, if you have the awesome will power to do so, you can end your problem without spending buckets of cash every year.

First, close up the spaces around utility entry ways, and while you’re at it, you should probably get those cracks in the foundation, as well. Secondly, walk over to your front door. Do you see it blowing open in the wind? Close it! Along with poorly sealed windows and vents, this is a main reason you see all those bugs crawling in and setting up camp. Thirdly, repaint or stain the exterior wood of your home. It’s like a colorful, little force field for your insect friends, or should you say, enemies. Fourthly, keep all storage items in your house in plastic, not cardboard. And last, but not least, always inspect new items that you bring into your home. You never know when you are harboring a gigantic bird-eating spider in your banana bunch.

It sounds like a lot, but mostly it’s stuff you should do on a regular basis just to keep your house looking neat. Keep it up year round, and you won’t see those bugs sitting in their camp grounds eating your food as their picnic.

In American households, there are a total of 60 million pet cats. Unfortunately, while these kitties are fed, petted, loved, and sheltered on rainy days, there are an estimated 100 million feral cats roaming about the country. Feral cats differ from stray cats; feral cats are cats that are born and live in the wild, while stray cats are domesticated cats that once had a home and may have been lost, abandoned, or otherwise separated.

Feral cats are not pleasant creatures. They are ferocious and extremely defensive, which they need to be, in order to survive in the wild. They are not friendly, and will usually attack anyone or anything by which they feel threatened. If you have a problem with feral cats hanging in or around your home, it is recommended that you not try to capture them, yourself. They can be riddled with many different types of diseases, both fatal and nonfatal, such as rabies, ringworm, feline leukemia, cat scratch fever, and more. Hire a wildlife removal professional to take care of the problem, instead. Home remedies, such as rags soaked in ammonia, moth balls, and ultrasonic pest repellent gadgets rarely work for the prevention of stray and feral cats. The only real way to rid your home of these vicious felines is to find them and have them manually removed by an experienced professional.

You can, at least, take a measure to prevent feral and stray cats from coming to your door by NOT FEEDING THEM. Many people feel sorry for homeless kitties and feel obligated to help them out. While this is nice, in principle, in practice, it will only bring your satisfied beggar right back… and he’ll probably bring his friends!

To help decrease the growing number of homeless and feral cats living in our country, please, make sure that you have your cats spayed or neutered. The more feral cats there are in the wild, the more you and your house cats are put at risk.

We all remember the childhood terrors of the creepy-crawly invaders who were rumored to scurry across our sheets at night and eat us alive, as we cowered uneasily beneath our covers. Of course, as adults, we no longer fear these “bed bugs,” less commonly known as Cimex lectularius, but do they not still creep through the back of our minds as we lie in bed feeling a little itch on our legs or a tickle coming from our pillows? Unfortunately for the alliteration of the bedtime farewell, these may not be bed bugs. They may, in fact, be carpet beetles.

The carpet beetle is a small, dark, oval insect, with some colored marks on its back, typically measuring less than ¼ inch in length. This opposes the bed bug, which is a reddish brown-colored, flattened, oval, wingless insect with microscopic hairs that give it a banded appearance. Adults grow to be about 4 to 5 mm (one-eighth to three-sixteenths of an inch) in length. Bed bugs are often found in commonly unsanitary places such as hotels or motels and can attach themselves to one’s clothing or stow away in one’s luggage. They are generally only active around dawn and tend to be found hidden in darker places such as mattress seams, mattress interiors, bed frames, nearby furniture, carpeting, baseboards, inner walls, tiny wood holes, or bedroom clutter. Carpet beetles, on the other hand, are not afraid of the daylight. They are commonly found indoors, sometimes around windows. Larvae can be found wandering from room to room in a house, which results in an infestation throughout the house. They can also be found wandering about in cereals, stored grains, nuts, meal, Indian corn, red pepper, and similar products. They may feed on wool products, furs, hides, horns, feathers, hair, and silk.

If it seems that your house is, in fact, infested with carpet beetles, take steps to prevent them from getting too cozy in your home. Vacuum regularly, and do not store fabrics that have been exposed to food spills. Check your house for infested material, and discard anything you find to be contaminated. You can use moth crystals or flakes when storing wool or food products that are potentially at risk.

So, goodnight, sleep tight, and make sure you get your bugs right!