We were out for a walk on Frensham Common the other day and amongst the heather, we found loads of funnel-shaped webs of Agelena labyrinthica; gently poke the web with a stem of grass and the spider comes charging out of the central tube to investigate; the kids were fascinated.
D’oh. I also learned that the first tarantulas (named after the city of Taranto) are really wolf spiders.
Wolf spiders DO bite.
Here’s a site with a picture of a wolfie with its babies… pretty interesting! A common site around my house (SouthEast PA) when I was in high school.
According to the site:
So a brown recluse would be about half the size of the OP’s spider.
Oops! According to the other site linked by Astroboy14:
Sorry about that. :o
Well cool, then.
Each summer one of the larger jumpers (very black with white spots, body about 3/8 - 1/2 inch long) comes to watch our mail for us. As long as the postal carrier doesn’t smash her while throwing ads into the box, she’ll stay nearly the whole summer, laying her egg sac at the back corner of the mailbox.
I’ve got a very wolfie looking spider in a web by my porch light. I cannot for the life of me identify it. It’s very large; the body is about an inch long. But since wolf spiders live on the ground, I know that’s not what it is. It’s grayish brown and seems to have some red on it. I wish I had a digital camera! We often have a porch friend in the summer. Our buddy last year built the web between the porch supports. Those webs were massive; the supports are about 6 feet apart!
sigh bloody hamsters… 
It’s one of the varieties of wolf spider. Some of them are greyish and build little funnel webs in corners that they hide in and hunt from. The one pictured is a roving hunter I think. I had a nasty experience with one of those once. Down south they have a variety with very large legs.
It is a harmless house spider of the wolf variety. I have several in my home and allow them to live in peace. The female house spider will make a web in a corner of the ceiling or a crack in a door frame and will happily live out her 6-8 year life span ridding your home of all sorts of bothersome creatures including cockroaches and wasps. The males are the ones that move around. Granted they can be scary and can sometimes get into places you wouldn’t want them, like your couch or bed. The best way to deal with them is to take a large jar and a piece of paper, place the jar over the spider, slide the paper under (or over if the spider is on the ceiling) the jar as a lid and simply toss outdoors. If you’re really fidgity open the door before proceeding, toss the jar itself outside then retrieve later when you are calmer.
I realize it is normal for people to be scared of creatures smaller than us, I for one am phobic about yellow jackets, but the best I can say is that unless you like stinging insects, roaches or mosquitos, it’s best to become friendly with spiders, frogs and lizards as they are a much safer way to rid your home of the other pests than pesticides, or those combat-type discs which children and pets love to eat!
Here are some good sites on spiders.
http://www.ufsia.ac.be/Arachnology/Pages/A_collec.html
http://pherec.org/entguides/EntGuide7-Spiders.html
This post in loving memory of Elgonia, my faithful bathroom friend for 5 years, may her children carry on her legacy!