Do you have Ants in your House?

This is my second spring in my new home. I love my home, and I love spring, so this is a great thing.

Except...

This is also my second spring with an ANT problem.

I hate those little buggers. They get into food, they crawl on the counters, they get in through the very tiniest of spaces, and no matter how clean I keep my house, they get in, and they find something, somewhere to invade.

I think that I have finally found a wonderful combination of solutions to solve this problem for good. It has certainly cleared my house of them since I first did it. That is only one of the wonderful things about this. First of all, it's cheap, and uses safe things that I already have in my home (and you probably have in yours also.).

The first thing that I did, was get online and search for ant control methods. That was nice because first of all, there are TONS of solutions to read about, and second, it told me that I am absolutely not the only person with this problem (I mean, who wants to talk about the BUGS in our house?!).

One thing that I read about a lot is cinnamon. Ants apparently hate cinnamon, and I have learned that if you sprinkle a little bit near anywhere you think they may be coming in, they won't walk past it (and they haven't. You can see their trail, in something like that. They have yet to come through any of my cinnamon).

That is a great deterrent to keep them from coming in, which is great, but my problem was that I already have them in my house. They're already here! So I had to come up with a way to kill them (that wouldn't also harm my child, dog or cat!)

Here's the best solution that I found.

Get a sauce pan, with about a cup of water, half cup of sugar, and about half a cup of dish soap and bring it to a boil. Put it into a spray bottle and spray it on the surfaces that are most popular to ants. It will harden there, but that's okay, ants will come and eat it. I did it last night, and there was a bit of an ant graveyard on the counter when I woke up this morning. Then, what I did, was scraped it off the counter (this step is optional) and left it there so that some ants could go ahead and feed it to their families (the things I read didn't tell me to do this, but I figured it'd be a good extra step.) I only scraped a little bit though, because washing it later proved to be much easier!

I haven't seen an ant on my counter since. I will update if they come back and I have to repeat it, but I'm going to keep the cinnamon there for a few days before vacuuming it up, so hopefully no more will be coming in (and if they do, I'll know my cinnamon is in the wrong spot!).