The Conservatory or Garden Room at the Back
A glazed room sitting between a carpeted house and a garden collects everything that flies. Warm air under the roof draws insects in through an open door on a summer evening, and the ones that get in head for the glass and stay there. Add a roof structure with a ledge at every junction, a frame with a channel running round it and a set of blinds nobody takes down, and there is an anchor point every few inches. Webs go up in the top corners and along the glazing bars first, and the dust they catch is what makes them show. What attracts spiders into a property is clear that the food supply decides the numbers far more than anything else you can change.
Why clearing it never seems to last
Sweep a conservatory roof down and it looks perfect for a fortnight. The insects, though, have not stopped arriving, and a room that is only used in good weather gives the next spider the same undisturbed corners the last one had. That is the pattern worth treating: the same room, refilling, month after month, rather than the odd spider that walks in from the lawn.
The Attached Garage and the Door Into the House
A garage on the side of an interwar semi is cool, dim and stacked — paint tins, bikes, boxes, the tools nobody has moved since they were put down. The gap between a wall and a stack of cardboard is the best spider habitat most houses have, and an up-and-over door with daylight showing under it keeps the insect supply topped up. What makes the garage worth mentioning when you book is the internal door: a utility room or a kitchen on the other side means spiders have a short, easy route indoors, and a brush strip at the bottom of that door does more than any amount of sweeping. The same corners indoors are listed in where spiders hide inside homes.
Sheds, storage rooms and the eaves cupboard
The shed at the end of the garden, a boxroom used for storage and the eaves cupboard in a loft conversion all work the same way, and so does the space behind stored suitcases. Pulling stacked boxes a hand's width off the wall and putting the contents into lidded crates achieves more in an afternoon than clearing webs at ceiling height ever will, and why spiders gather in lofts is worth reading if the roof space is busy too.
False Widows Around Frames, Sills and Outside Fittings
The noble false widow is glossy and dark, with a rounded abdomen and pale markings across the top, and it has been widespread across London for years. It likes gaps around window and door frames, the underside of a sill, the back of an outside light and the inside of a shed. It is not a dangerous spider and being bitten is an unusual event; where it happens, the feeling is generally likened to a wasp sting. Speak to a pharmacist or GP about any bite that swells badly or starts to look infected, and call 999 if there are signs of a severe allergic reaction. How dangerous Brent's spiders really are weighs the whole thing up sensibly.
The Big Ones That Cross the Floor in Autumn
From late August into October, large fast spiders appear in baths, on carpets and crossing a room after dark. They are mature males that have left a garage, a shed or a wall cavity to look for a female, and a handful of them over a few weeks in a house with a garden is simply the season arriving on time. Nothing is being built and nothing is settling in. What deserves attention looks different: silk and egg sacs going back up in one particular room week after week, right round the year. Why spiders keep appearing in the same rooms draws the line between the two, and why there seem to be so many spiders covers the swings through the year.
What Treatment Can and Cannot Do
Treatment is for the rooms in your own home where spiders and webs keep rebuilding, and it can bring those numbers down and slow how quickly they come back. It cannot stop insects leaving a garden on a warm evening, and it cannot make a conservatory with the door open all summer into a spider-free room, so nobody should be offering you that. What pest control can do about spiders is straight about where the limits sit. Where one room is unusually busy, it is worth asking what they are living on: carpet beetle larvae in the fluff along a skirting and carpet moths in a stored wool rug will both keep a spider population fed, and whether lots of spiders mean another pest problem looks at that link.
Before you book
- List the rooms where webs keep returning, leaving out the hall, the landing and the stairs
- Say whether the garage is attached with a door into the house, or stands separately on the drive
- Mention the conservatory separately, and whether its door stands open through the summer
- Pull boxes and stored furniture away from the walls and corners so those corners can be reached
- Vacuum down old webs and egg sacs first and empty the machine into the outside bin
- Say where any false widows have been seen, with a photo taken from a safe distance if you managed one
Fewer Webs in a Sudbury Conservatory or Garage
None of this makes a garden-backed family house spider-free, but it changes how fast a room fills up again. Reducing spiders around windows and doors goes into detail, how to stop spiders coming back covers the weeks after a visit, Spider Control Brent covers the rest of the borough, and nearby Wembley takes the same question in blocks of flats.
- Fit a brush strip under the garage door and under the internal door into the utility room
- Close blinds or curtains after dark so lit glass at the back of the house does not pull insects in
- Switch the outside light off when it is not wanted, or fit a warmer-coloured bulb so fewer insects gather under it
- Store things in lidded plastic crates on a shelf rather than cardboard stacked against a garage wall
- Cut ivy and climbers back off the shed, the frames and the conservatory, and keep the shed door closed
- Brush out the top corners and glazing bar junctions of the conservatory two or three times a year
