Surprising Ways Pests Can Enter Your Home

Pests can enter your home in some surprising ways. Listed below are some of the entryways along with how you can easily avoid pests gaining access to your home.

1. Grocery Bags

Before your food ever arrives at the supermarket, it passes through a variety of environments where pests abound. Warehouses, docks, and back storerooms often can't be protected against every single little pest or the eggs they lay. Your grocery bag then comes from the store to your home, where tiny, almost invisible larvae that are in the bags can hatch into adult pests right inside your pantry.

To prevent this from happening, discard all grocery bags as soon as you unpack your food items. Better yet, use reusable cloth grocery bags that you can launder as often as necessary.

2. Pet Door

Most homeowners who have a pet door take the security precaution of locking the door overnight so burglars can't use it to come inside. But even the smallest pet doors made for little pets can allow rodents to enter your home. If you have a cat who is a good hunter, you may even have still-living rodents delivered right to your pet door. If you find yourself with a rodent problem, it could be due to your pet door. Not all rodents are nocturnal, so locking the door at night isn't enough.

Consider moving the position of your pet door up higher on the door so that crawling rodents can't get in, but your pet can still make the small jump through the door.

3. Garage Door

Pests often seek shelter from extreme heat or cold, just as people do. An open garage door is a tempting entryway for mice and other pests that want to make a winter nest or find reprieve from uncomfortably high temperatures. Once they find their way into the garage, all they need to do is take advantage of your partially-open door leading from the garage to the house.

Keep your garage door closed as much as possible, opening and closing it only to go in and out with vehicles or equipment. If you need to keep the door open for long periods of time for any reason, it's worth it to place several pest traps in the corners and along the edges of the garage floor.

If pests overrun your home, invest in pest control services to rid your house of them. Your pest control professional can provide additional advice about keeping pests out of your home over the long term.

For more information, contact a local company like Rainbow Pest Control.

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