There is nothing worse than finding mice droppings or hearing a cockroach scuttling along with your skirting board. A pest infestation can make you feel like you are being forced out of your own home, and some pests really can make your house unlivable. The worst thing about a major pest infestation is that it has been established it can be extremely difficult to eradicate.

The best course of action is always to try and prevent the infestation from happening in the first place. If you have noticed any of the signs of pests in your home, you may be wondering what steps you can take to stop the situation from spiraling out of control. To help you get your home back, here are some expert tips on how to prevent pest infestations.

1. Call in the Experts

An infestation can be a serious problem, and if you have any suspicions at all that your home has been invaded, it is usually better to call in the experts to deal with it. A pest control expert will be able to accurately assess whether the cockroach which went scurrying across your bathroom floor when you turned on the light was a lone explorer or part of a major infestation. Once a pest problem has escalated to a certain size, it will be beyond you to deal with it yourself, but a professional exterminator will be able to take the necessary measures to get rid of the pests.

2. Make Sure to Clean Up All Traces of Food

Most pests are attracted into your home by traces of food. While many people think that just storing their food away will be enough to prevent an infestation, you need to be a lot more diligent than that. Keeping food in the fridge or in sealed tupperware is a good start, but you also need to ensure that all crumbs, spills, and other tiny traces of food. These will attract ants, cockroaches, and even rats and mice. Make sure you clean your kitchen thoroughly, particularly spots like underneath your refrigerator and in nooks and crannies around your burners and oven.

3. Set Effective Traps and Poison

There are lots of different traps and poison you can use to prevent a pest infestation from occurring. With ant infestations, you should use special time-delayed poison that enables the ants to get back to their colonies and infect all of the other ants before they die. With rats and mice, it is better to use non-lethal traps rather than poison because you could end up with a decomposing rat somewhere in your house which you are unable to find but are certainly able to smell.

Once a colony of ants or an intrusion of cockroaches has laid down its roots in your house, it may already be too late to deal with the problem. Follow the preventive tips in this guide and you will have a good chance of stopping an infestation from happening. If your pest problem starts to get out of control, it may be time to call in the experts to deal with the infestation once and for all.