On to round three of the full apartment declutter project! A couple weeks ago, I had said that the kitchen was just about where I wanted it to be. And I thought it was. Until spring sprung and I had to contend with a small (or large, physically LARGE) ant problem. Suddenly, what seemed like totally fine became not good enough, as in -- ants could hide in there! So where I thought things would be difficult this time around, it couldn't have been easier finding more crap to get rid of !
May 4: Ok, under the sink was where I stored all the old bags from before I carried canvas sacks everywhere with me. I use the bags for trash. But under the sink is where the ants are entering the Love Loft! So I gathered a whole bunch of the plastic bags and brought them to the grocery store for recycling.
May 5: Then I moved out all the paper bags out to the gift wrapping box. I have a whole bunch of birthdays and mothers days and such coming up and the paper bags made super cute gift wrap. (see above)
May 6: Now that I had addressed the area that the ants were coming in, I had to address the food. The ants had already invaded a bag of Banana Nut Cherios and some pretzels, so I threw those away and moved everything else into airtight containers or zip lock bags.
May 7: Went through all the coupons I had clipped to the fridge and threw away all the expired ones.
May 8: Same with the reciepts I had kept for gifts from a while back
May 9: Also under the sink, I had some foam stuff that I used for cushioning when I mailed stuff out to friends across the country. I noticed this day that the ants seemed to like it a bit too much. So that got thrown away, too.
May 10: And last but not least, I went through the stack of take out menus I have in the drawer and weeded out the restaurants that had gone under or restaurants I WILL NEVER order from. They went into recycling.
Incidently, does anyone know of a green solution to ant problems? I tried the baking soda, the chili powder, the lavender oil. None seem to help. They seem to be attracted most to water (even more than Banana Nut Cheerios) so I'm trying to keep the sink totally dry all the time. No small feat.
3 comments:
Those jerks... they got into your Banana Nut Cheerios?! That would definitely mean war at my house! :)
Hope you can get rid of the little pesks soon.
Ants are the worst! Okay, well not the WORST... but they're definitely not fun!
I've heard that cinnamon deters them, but I've never tried it. If you can tell where exactly the ants are coming from, and somehow trace them back to their home, boiling water works really well to kill the whole colony. Good luck!
I've had problems with ants on and off for YEARS and have yet to find a solution. Heck, the ones out here don't even seem to respond to the non-green solutions!
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