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Pests That Frequent Your Home

Our homes provide us with a safe place to find comfort and peace, but it can also become a home to pests who are determined enough to get inside. Seeing a cockroach or a spider scurry across your kitchen floor is more than enough to call the exterminator. As a homeowner, you’ll almost certainly come across the occasional undesirable guest, but it helps to know what kinds of pests are most likely to settle down in your house.

Kitchen

  • Ants: Ants love the kitchen more than any other spot in your home for two reasons: food and moisture. Some prefer sweet foods, while others prefer greasy foods, but all ants are highly attracted to moisture, and since your kitchen offers both in abundance they’ll be eager to establish the room as a meet-up spot. You can often find them sticking around sources of water, such as beneath leaky fixtures or behind water pipes. You can decrease your chances of an ant infestation by keeping food off the counters, cleaning crumbs from the floor, fixing leaks, and promptly mopping up spills.
  • Cockroaches: Cockroaches are a common kitchen insect, making their way inside through cracks and openings in the doors or walls, or sneaking a ride via grocery bags or boxes. To dissuade cockroaches from finding your home to be the perfect habitat, clean up quickly after every meal, store your food in sealed containers, and take out your trash regularly.
  • Rodents: Rats and mice often seek shelter indoors, and will make their way inside searching for warmth and food. The kitchen provides them with these needs, but, unfortunately, it’s also the space in your home that they can cause the most damage in; many of them carry types of harmful bacteria that will contaminate your food, kitchen surfaces, and equipment, so if you see a rodent scurrying through the kitchen, take action and call an exterminator immediately.

Bedroom

  • Bed Bugs: As their name suggests, bed bugs are frequently found in the bedroom and are perhaps the most common bedroom pest, hiding within mattresses or box springs until nightfall. Though they can hide in any dark spot in the house, our bedrooms are the most preferred area as it gives them a straight shot to their food source (us) as soon as they emerge during the night.
  • Fleas: Similarly to bed bugs, fleas feed on warm-blooded mammals, so they can easily make their way into your bedroom if they’ve attached themselves to a household pet. And though they prefer pets such as dogs and cats, they won’t hesitate to make a meal out of you and your family if given the opportunity.

Bathroom

  • Cockroaches: Cockroaches have a known fondness for sewers and drains, so the fact that they can oftentimes be found in your home’s bathrooms is unsurprising. They favor environments that are warm and moist, so the bathrooms are a dream destination, and if your shower or sink drain isn’t regularly cleaned or covered it could serve as an escort for roaches into your home.
  • Ants: Besides food, the biggest motivator for an ant to make your home theirs as well is the attraction of moisture and warmth. No room in the house will be more tempting for this factor than a bathroom. Many types of ants prefer warm, humid environments with close access to water, so they’ll nest beneath your floors and within the walls, coming out in search of food.

Basement

  • Spiders: Spiders love to make their home in dark, moist surroundings where they can spin their webs in peace and quiet. This makes the basement the most preferred and common dwelling for spiders within your home. All types of spiders can be found down there, from harmless cellar spiders to more venomous species, so it helps to be familiar with the kinds of unsafe spiders that can be found in your area.
  • Cockroaches: Cockroaches enter your home in search of warmth, darkness, food, and water, and they can find much of this in your basement. Clutter, moisture build-up, and grimy surroundings will easily entice them to make their way inside. They can enter through cracks, floor drains, pipes, and thresholds.
  • Rodents: Mice and rats like the nest in secluded, dark spaces, so the basement is often the perfect home for them. They’re resourceful creatures, and if they decide to move into your home they can enter through cracks and openings as small as the size of a nickel. They’ll likely try to stay out of sight, but you can tell the signs of a rodent infestation by keeping a lookout for droppings, gnaw marks, and scratch marks.

Living Room

  • Bed Bugs: Though their name may fool you into thinking they’re confined to dwell within your bedroom, bed bugs can survive anywhere inside your home so long as they have a dark, sheltered place to hide in the daytime and a food source nearby to seek out at night. Bed bugs are found in living room furniture just as easily as furniture in the bedroom. They can hitch a ride on the clothing or personal items of another host and then lie in wait within the sofa cushions to feed on anyone in your family who decides to doze off during a late-night movie.
  • Ants: Like in your kitchen, ants will venture into your living room in search of food. Whether you forget about the crumbs that dropped during your midnight snack or you leave your leftovers out from the night before, ants will be more than happy to finish them off.

Saela provides both residential and commercial services including: Pests, Mosquitoes, Rodents, Fleas & Bed Bugs.

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