Providing Tips for Preparing Your Home for Effective Pest Treatment
Bedbugs, ants, spiders — while nature’s wonders, they’re less welcome when they’re sharing your living space. When facing an unmanageable pest problem, seeking expert help is often the best solution.
Before the pest control experts arrive, it’s essential to prepare your home to maximize their effectiveness while ensuring safety for your family and belongings.
Read on as we take you through some essential tips to prepare your home for a pest control visit. Let’s start!
Is Preparation Really Necessary?
In order to maximize the effectiveness of their pest control measures and efforts, your house needs to create an environment that removes the hiding spaces for pests.
Preparing your home for pest control may seem like an extra hassle, but it’s a crucial step in ensuring the effectiveness of the treatment.
Here’s why it matters:
- It keeps your consumables safe from coming into contact with the products that the pest control experts use. Preparation prevents the products we use from contaminating areas or items that are considered sensitive (for example, toys, pet food, etc.).
- Preparing your house prior to the visit demonstrates respectful conduct on your part towards the experts who arrive at your place. They can get to work right away, helping them save their own time as well and ensuring they can treat the areas where the pests tend to hide.
- If you have antiques or other precious items in your house, products can potentially damage these items. Preparing your house includes getting these items out of the way and preventing them from getting damaged.
Even after pest control operations are completed, it is important to observe all the precautions that your experts outline for you. Especially if you have children at home, be sure to follow the after care instructions to ensure everyone’s safety and effectiveness of the treatment.
Pest Control: 11 Handy Tips to Prepare Your House
Let’s now go over ten handy tips which you can use to prepare your house for pest control operations:
- Take Pictures
Admitting that your house is overrun with pests can be hard. You can take pictures and high-definition photographs to share with your pest control expert for guidance.
Use a good-quality camera and take pictures of the affected areas, such as ant hills or rodent boroughs, fruit flies, etc. Taking pictures and sharing them with your pest control company helps them formulate a general idea about your house’s situation and what extent of treatment may be required.
- Ensure Access
Pests prefer to hide in spaces where immovable items are placed so that they can carry out their daily lives uninterrupted. A good example is a tight corner with a corner table set up against it.
In order for the pest control experts to do their job, you must give them full access to every corner of your house, which means opening up all the corners and tight spaces.
You can begin by moving the items into the yard or garage for the time being.
- Prepare Your Kitchen
The kitchen is the most sensitive area of your house for three reasons. One, it has all the edibles stored in it. Two, it also has a lot of waste (organic and inorganic). Where there is waste, there are bound to be pests, like fruit flies or cockroaches. Three, there are numerous harbourage areas (for example, behind the appliances, in the cupboards and/or pantry) and potential points of entry (such as pipe openings under the sink and/or dishwasher).
Your kitchen may be the one area that needs the highest intensity of treatment. Therefore, it is important to prepare your kitchen before pest control visits.
Prepare your kitchen in the following way:
- Gather up all the consumables placed on the counters or in the open and temporarily store them outside of the kitchen (for example, on the balcony in plastic storage containers) and in the refrigerator.
- Clean out all the trash and debris from the bins, from underneath the appliances, and from all the crevices in the walls or between cabinetry.
Ensure that the pest control professionals have good reach into all the nooks and crannies of your kitchen to do their job. Also, make sure that your food is safely stored away so as not to be contaminated with our products.
- Move Your Furniture
If your sofas, chairs, cabinets, or sideboards are sitting snug against the walls, it is time to move them away. Create ample space between the walls and your furniture to allow pest control professionals to examine the situation behind them.
This step is particularly important if your house has a recurring pest problem and the infestation is greater than originally anticipated. By moving furniture away from the walls, our products can easily reach the normally inaccessible areas where pests find it ideal to hide.
- Open Up Your House
When it comes to smaller and more agile pests (like mice), it is important to open all the closet doors, drawers, and cupboards of your house. Mice are adept at finding deep corners to squeeze and hide in.
By opening up these hiding spaces, you can make it easier for the pest control experts to follow the pest trail and catch them before they do further damage to your property. It is easier to find hiding pests when everything is open.
- Secure Your Pets
Pest control operations require uninterrupted focus. If you have pets like birds, dogs, or cats, it is best to keep them securely leashed away from the pest control operation for several reasons:
- Pets can interrupt pest experts while they are working, causing a reduction in efficiency.
- Pets may come in contact with our products, which can upset their health and well-being.
- Pets often get nervous or excited if they sense activity in their home, and it may cause them anxiety and stress to watch strangers (pest experts) invading their territory.
- Try to Be Home
It is understandable that, with work and other commitments, it isn’t always possible to be home to walk the experts through your house. However, make prior arrangements in your schedule so that you get the chance to explain to the experts the exact nature and extent of the pest problem you are facing.
It can help them address the situation better. For example, it isn’t always easy for pest control experts to locate where a mouse has made a nest in your house, but you would know since you have been living with it. This speeds up the process.
You can read this blog to understand the subtle signs of rodent infestation in your house.
- Tidy Up
Although this part isn’t necessary, it is best to tidy up the house before the pest control team arrives. You may have your laptop open on the desk, or your laundry may still be hung on the line, drying off. It is best to put everything away so that the products that will be applied do not get onto these items.
This is especially important if you have toddlers in the house whose clothing may get contaminated, potentially creating allergic situations for them.
- Quarantine, If Possible
It would be a big help for the pest control professional if you could manage to confine the pests to a limited, controlled space.
For example, if you know that a mouse has made its home somewhere inside your bedroom, close the doors and windows and seal the area as best as you can, so it cannot escape. This will make it easier for the pest control team to catch and remove the mouse or to find its nest and uproot the problem.
- Remove Curtains and Drapes
Depending on the type of treatment, curtains or drapes in your home can hold onto some product applications. This may be detrimental to the health of the occupants, which is why it is necessary to remove them before the operation begins.
Make sure that they are neatly folded and tucked away from the application. If any contact has been discovered, it is best to wash or dry clean them before hanging them up again.
- Make a List
To get the best results, you can help your pest control experts with a list of spaces that you know for sure have an infestation. That is where your experts can begin their pest control, proceeding with the leads they discover. It is always better to arm them with intel than to have them start with a blank slate.
Safe, Effective, and Responsive Pest Control Services
Finding pests in your home can be unsettling, but rest assured, professional pest control services are just a call away. When you need swift and effective solutions with minimal disruption to your property, rely on expert services to ensure the safety and well-being of your home and family.
Serving residents across Greater Vancouver, Ridall specializes in the removal of various intruders, including ants, birds, squirrels, raccoons, skunks, hornets, wasps, cockroaches, mice, rats, bed bugs, spiders, silverfish, flies, and moths. Our expert team is dedicated to ensuring the safety and well-being of your home and family.
With Ridall Pest Control, you can reclaim your space with confidence.
