I'm usually pretty neat, as in I clean my house once-a-week (and by clean, I mean really clean: sweep, wash the floors, sanitize every surface that can be sanitized...sometimes i even break out some wood cleaner for my desk and shelves.) Well, last Saturday, I didn't have time to clean, so I let my house sort of fall by the wayside. Last night, I started cleaning, and what did I discover: ants, everywhere. Hundreds of ants. No joke. I apparently had been walking over them without even noticing (which is totally gross as I tromp around my house barefoot) or, they all came in with the first snow that morning.
My first thought was: it's because I missed last Saturday's cleaning! Actually, my first thought was panic. I had visions of myself coming back from Christmas break with my floor so covered in ants that I couldn't see it (this, of course, didn't feel too far off considering how many ants had entered my house in a single week/day.) In my panic, I spent the next two hours reading up on what to do with ants. Hearing Windex & baking soda are repellents, I put baking soda along all my kitchen walls and Windexed even the floors.
Ant Control Advice Point One: Don't try to take care of ants at midnight. The baking soda might be a good idea, but in my tiredness, I got it everywhere! When I woke up today, there were still (many) more ants but also baking soda covering my way-too-slick Windexed floor. Recipe for disaster, I tell you.
Still feeling alarmed about the ants, I spent about three hours cleaning up the baking soda powder & caulking some molding on outside walls--there were pretty big gaps & I assumed the ants were slipping in there. Caulking was a lot harder than I expected. I feel like my thumbs are going to take a few days to recover. After I was done caulking, though, I suddenly noticed more ants, congregating around a heating vent! Good heavens, I thought, I've been caulking for nothing: they're coming through the vents. So, next step: I sprayed raid around the heating vents in my house (which probably means I'm going to be breathing some of it every time my heater kicks in.) This was fine and all until I noticed two rogue ants in my bedroom window. So--next came window spray & buying traps to put outside the windows. Then I moved all my furniture and swept away all the ants from underneath. It's 3:30 in the afternoon, by now, and I started this process at roughly 10 am.
Finally, 4:45, I go out to my laundry room/back porch, and there are seriously another hundred ants in the carpet. It was awful. Disgusting. I felt like I was going to melt. But--I started thinking about the huge gap under the door from my back porch to my kitchen and realizing the ants could have just crawled right through. So, this time I wised up: baking soda + raid + caulk. We'll see if this all works. I'm sincerely hoping I don't wake up tomorrow morning with a house full of ants again. I don't think I'll make it. I'm praying earnestly for an ant-free house.
It's not the ants I mind. Scratch that: I do mind them. But even more than that, dead bugs bring brown recluses into your house. Now that I've finally gotten rid of the recluses, the last thing I want is to bait them back in. Also, during all of this time, I was supposed to be writing a paper, due Thursday. Good heavens.
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