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DIY: Make Your Home Smell Like Fall

fall home interior

How To Make Your Home Smell Like Fall

Candles are great – their fall scents ranging from ‘Autumn in the Park’ to ‘Caramel Apple Cake’ will make your room smell like a nice warm autumn day; however, many of these scented candles are made of petroleum-based paraffin with suspicious artificial scents.

This season we are taking it back to old-school simmer pots – the way grandma used to do it. By combining naturally scented ingredients (you most likely already have in your pantry), you can fill your home with a wonderful, natural aroma all day long.

How To Do It

The basis of this requires a stove and a saucepan with boiling water. After that, you can get creative with how you make your scent, and personalize it to your preferences.

Ingredients like cinnamon sticks, apple peels, orange rinds, cloves, apple juice, vanilla, and nutmeg are great ingredients to encourage appetites in your guests. It will smell like you’ve been baking all day.Bonus tip: making fresh bread is a great way to accentuate the aroma – and will satiate all the hunger caused by the amazing smell in your home.

A good habit to get into is to save your fruit peels (like orange, pear, or apple skins). You can also salvage apple juice, cranberry juice, herbs and spices that are outdated in your recipes for the stove.

You can substitute ground spices instead of whole, but you may need to use more ground spices to get the same amount of aroma.

Once you’re satisfied with your autumn aroma for the night, you can refrigerate your simmering recipe. You can reuse daily for up to one week – just keep adding water as needed.

To get you started, we rounded up a few of our favorite recipes. (You’ll have to play with the ratios to find your perfect scent.)

Evergreen Pine

-Evergreen or Pine Needles

-Cinnamon sticks

-Whole cloves

-Bay leaves

-Orange peelings

-Lemon peelings

Cinnamon Apple Spice

-Cinnamon sticks

-Apple peelings

-Orange peelings

-Whole cloves

Lavender Nutmeg

-Dried lavender

-Nutmeg

-Cloves

-Cinnamon sticks

Orange Cranberry Spice

-Orange peelings

-Cranberries

-Whole cloves

-Cinnamon sticks

Try them all and tell us your favorite in the comments!

Make sure your home is properly maintained to match the rich fall aroma that is wafting throughout. Schedule a service with us for any and all of your home service needs.

DIY: Make Your Home Smell Like Fall

Bedbug inspection

How to Know if Your Hotel Has Bedbugs

Upon entering a hotel room, do you typically reach for the tiny toiletries, take a leap onto the bed, or perhaps start by inspecting for bed bugs? Knowing what to look for is essential. Anticimex Carolinas Service Manager Christian Tweed has shared valuable insights on identifying bed bugs in your hotel room and preventing them from hitching a ride back home with you. And if bed bugs do become an unexpected part of your vacation, remember that Clark’s Pest Control is here to assist!



Q&A with a Pest Professional


How do bed bugs get inside hotels?


Bed bugs are primarily hitchhiking insects as opposed to foraging ones, meaning that they get carried around on people’s clothes and belongings. Someone with an active infestation in their home can easily bring bed bugs to their hotel, but they can also be picked up during travel (airplanes, taxis, and rideshare services) and brought to a hotel room.


What do people misunderstand about bed bugs in hotels?


From a probability standpoint, all hotels will deal with bed bugs at some point in time. If you think about a bed bug’s method of travel, there’s literally nothing a hotel can do to stop them from being carried in. What I have realized is that luxury hotels are more likely to have an aggressive response to dealing with a bed bug case once it’s identified as they tend to have a higher quality of service and a reputation to protect. While this isn’t always the case, it has been my experience more often than not.

Got bedbugs? Call Clark’s at 866-781-4991 today!

What do you recommend travelers do when they get to their room to check for bed bugs?


Most hotel headboards hang directly on the wall. I start my inspection here before even looking at the bed itself. I have found bed bugs, their exoskeletons, and the telltale black stains they leave behind around the edges of or in the crevices of headboards. If the headboard looks clean, move on to looking over the pillowcases and comforter for any signs or stains. You can dig into the bedding as deep as you want here, but I encourage people to look over the top layer of things at the very least.


What are some lesser-known signs of bed bugs in your hotel room?


The specifics of the black stains they leave behind, which as gross as it sounds, are just digested blood as that’s all that bed bugs feed on. If the stains are on a hard surface, they will be small dots as if left behind by an ink pen and will smear into a brownish gray when moisture is applied. If they’re on fabric, they will usually bleed along the fibers making a small diamond, square or X shape.


If there are bed bugs in your hotel room, can they travel home with you?


They absolutely can, however this is easy to prevent. While staying in a hotel, keep as much of your clothing and luggage off the beds as possible. Storing suitcases in the bathroom might sound odd, but it’s an effective method of prevention.

Don’t tackle bedbugs yourself, call Clark’s at 866-781-4991!

What should you do with your suitcase if you suspect your hotel has bed bugs?


When arriving home from a trip, leave your luggage in the garage or on a porch and bring your clothes in one load of laundry at a time. If the clothes are dirty, wash them like you normally would, if they’re clean then run them through the dryer for at least forty-five minutes. Once your suitcase is empty, vacuum over it meticulously (don’t forget to empty the vacuum when you’re done), or if you’re in the right climate, expose it to heat for a few days by placing it in your vehicle (parked in the sun) or for a few weeks in your attic.


The Clark’s Solution


If you brought bed bugs back to you home, Clark’s is here to help. Our Bedbug Control service is designed to eliminate bedbugs and create a safe, comfortable environment.


A Clark’s Pest Professional will do an inspection and recommend a plan of attack to get rid of bed bugs now and prevent them from hatching in the future. Call Clark’s at 866-781-4991 today for more information.




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