by Jonte Rhodes

Created on: August 08, 2008

Many people around the world find spiders scary and don't like it when spiders share their homes with them. The trouble is that many species of spider find our homes to be excellent places to live, so they often come into contact with humans. Many people think that the best way to get rid of spiders is to just kill them whenever they see them, but this is usually not the best way to be rid of them in the long term. Instead the best course of action is to assess why the spiders tend to inhabit your house, and try to then dissuade them from doing so in the future.

The first thing to look at when trying to be rid of spiders is the type of places that they inhabit time and again, which is typically places that aren't disturbed very often and are shaded the majority of the time. Web spinning spiders certainly will only inhabit somewhere they can spin webs undisturbed and there are good surfaces to build their webs around.

So the key to being rid of them is often as simple as making sure that there aren't many dark secluded areas in your home. This means that furniture should be pushed against the walls, leaving no gaps, and that space underneath things like dressers should be filled. Also holes in brickwork or behind wooden panels should always be filled and made smooth. Smooth surfaces such as plastered or painted walls dissuade spiders from making home there because they often lack places for the spiders to hide from predators and so leave them exposed on their webs.

Hunting spiders on the other hand will readily go anywhere their prey is, and aren't as affected by the environmental factors such as the weather. The best way to be rid of them is to make sure that the species that they feed on cant easily be found in your home. These include things like silver fish, which often lurk under carpets and in dank places such as cellars. Similarly woodlice and millipedes will enter the home if damp conditions and rotting material can be found. So ensuring your home is dry throughout and there aren't places permanently in the shade is a good way to keep spiders out.

Of course some spiders are hard to remove permanently, especially in areas such as basements or sheds that aren't often entered. The reason that many spiders live in these areas is because they aren't often disturbed and because there are usually many small nooks and crannies that they can hide in. Something to remember about these spiders is that they aren't getting there by going through the rest of the house. They are in fact either getting through the wall cavities or have access to the outside of the house easily. In basements especially, plugging up all access to the room under doorframes and at the edges of windowsills is vital.

Garden sheds and garages are two places that everyone expects to see spiders, but they don't necessarily have to be. Making the surfaces of walls slick so that spiders find it difficult to scale them is a good idea. This can be something as simple as painting over exposed brickwork or even painting a layer of sticky lacquer at a certain height. If this is a continuous band all the way across the room then spiders will find it very difficult to pass, and wont be able to make any webs high up. Which is something several species need to thrive.

Lastly making sure windows and doors aren't left open unnecessarily is essential to spider prevention, particularly towards the end of summer. Most spiders either die off or hibernate at this time of the year, due to the drop in temperature and decreased prey activity. They will therefore often enter houses because the warmer temperatures and fewer predators allow them to survive easier, and find safer places to hide away for the winter.

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