Getting rid of unwanted aliens with spring cleaning!

Now that all the snow is gone for the year, I enjoyed the entire weekend cleaning each (3) bedroom top to bottom; getting rid of old stuff and spraying for bugs.

I hate spiders, nothin’ else on this planet…they’re not even officially insects. That’s creepy in it-self. To tell the truth, I’m not so sure they even belong on this planet.

I had a dream once, that a meteor fell from the sky on young earth and it cracked in half when it hit the ground and a bunch of giant prehistoric spiders came crawling out with big people eyes and heads that tilted back and forth while they hummed, “me-me-me-me-me-me…” Some horrible spider language, which meant, “lets suck the blood out of all these delicious animals.”

Needless to say, I don’t like them alien spiders too much.

When we moved into this house we had big, nasty, spiders crawling around everywhere, and the basement and garage was a spider/cockroach/grasshopper haven.

Now, with my yearly ritual, they’ve virtually all disappeared. I believe this is the first year I vacuumed behind furniture and didn’t find dead spiders in the corners. The basement was spider free too. Not too excited about all the work, but I was happy to find we finally live in a bug free environment.

In lieu of not having anything else to write about, I’ll explain how I do it.

The main idea is this, use as little bug spray as possible (not too good for the kids), and get maximum spider killing results.

First I clean the inside of the house real good and then spray for bugs along the baseboards…not too heavy ‘cause we got the toddlers runnin’ around.

Second I clean and vacuum the basement and garage and spray for bugs…little heavier dose here. I put a little extra at the obvious entry points –where the gas reader leads into the basement, around the garage door…you get the idea. Eventually I’ll attack the basement with caulk and seal up as many of those points as I can, but I never seem to have the time.

Third, when I’m confident it won’t rain for a while, I spray the outer perimeter of the house and all around the outside of the windows. I use an over the counter, bug spray.

My theory was this (I seem to have a theory about everything), when I spray the basement and garage (which had the most bugs in the past), them bugs would come running inside. When some get in, they get the killed from the inside baseboard spraying. Spraying the outside of the house just decreases the amount of bugs that make it into the garage and basement in the first place.

Well our spider population has decreased each year and now I didn’t find any dead spiders that made it inside. So its safe to say this method works. Although it seems like I’m spraying a lot, it took about four years to use up a gallon of “Home Defense” bug spray, so it’s economical too.

I felt I had to get it done this week, ‘cause next week I’ll have to start doing yard work and once that starts I’ll never have the time. I promise I won’t bore you with yard details next week.

And now you know.

COMING NEXT: Stephen can read?