Last weekend I decided to tackle the daunting chore of cleaning off our covered porch. It was full of leaves, pine needles and cobwebs that I have been tactfully ignoring. When we built our home, we had this awesome idea to have a 30 foot by 12 foot covered porch built, with built-in fans and everything. When it’s at it’s cleanest, it looks like something right off of a beautiful Pinterest board or even a Better Homes and Gardens magazine.
The one thing you never think of is all of the bugs that enjoy your covered patio just as much as you do. The amount of flies that hide from the hot sun in the summertime is overwhelming. As annoying as flies can be, I can tolerate them much more than spiders.
Now I have to admit, the spiders taking up residence on the porch is partially my own fault. Being the paranoid person I am, I leave our porch lights on all night. In my mind, if you’re going to break into a house, it’s probably not going to be the one that is lit up and has obvious security camera’s on the property. Of course leaving the porch lights on attracts bugs, which in turn attracts hungry spiders. Even though the spiders we have in Washington state are relatively small compared to other parts of the country, they still creep me out.
While pulling off all of our furniture off of the porch, I noticed tons of spiders, cobwebs and spider egg sacs pretty much everywhere…gross! Once I had cleaned the entire porch off and hosed down as many spiders and egg sacs that I could, I decided to get online to see if I could find some type of spider repellent. Fall is just around the corner and it is only going to get worse! I was able to find a very simple DIY spider repellent recipe and luckily, I already had all of the ingredients on hand.
Materials:
Instructions:
- Put all of the ingredients in a spray bottle, shake well and apply generously!
I was very surprised to see just how well this recipe works. Apparently, spiders really do not like peppermint and citrus scents. I sprayed down our entire porch with this spider repellent spray and the next day, I found that there were only two new webs. They were in places that were hard for me to reach, so I went back out with a stool and generously sprayed those areas and found that the spiders abandoned the webs after that. We also have river rocks bordering a lot of our yard. Wolf spiders love to make their webs in these rock areas. I went out and sprayed their webs down with a hose and then sprayed more of this spider repellent spray on the rocks and miraculously, they all left and went to make webs elsewhere. This DIY spider repellent spray rocks and plus it smells really good! To keep spiders away for good, treat areas with this spray once a month.