I'm going to admit something I probably shouldn't. But I'm gonna keep it real. This Spring/Summer, we have had some issues with pests. At the beginning of Spring, we had termites in our raised bed. We got rid of the wood, and all of the soil, which was beautiful soil, but I was scared that it was full of termites, so it had to go.
The next pest was ants. Do you remember the post on how to get rid of ants naturally? Well it worked to a certain extent, but they ants were plentiful, so I had to use something a bit more powerful than cinnamon and oranges. I didn't want to spray my yard because of the kids and the dog playing in the backyard, so I used Ortho Home Defense Max Ant Bait. At first it didn't seem like it was working (I only gave it two days), but then it started raining, and continued raining for a few days. When all was dry, there were no more ants. Whoo Hoo!
After the ants, the pests started coming inside. The new pests were mice! Oh my goodness, I thought I was gonna lose my mind at this point (little did I know what was to come). My cats started hanging out in the kitchen in front of us, which is unusual because they aren't allowed in the kitchen. I'm sure when we leave the house they probably hang out in there, but that's neither here nor there :) Anyway they would lay around staring at the sink cabinets. I wasn't sure why they were doing it until one day I found it...nasty, disgusting, mouse poop. Eww!! So I told hubby to lay out some traps. We had some wooden ones because when the weather starts to change we have had a mouse or two come in the house in the past. Well hubby set them up with peanut butter and the next morning the mouse had come and eaten the peanut butter off the trap! Not cheese, peanut butter! That mouse had some time to sit there for a while, so apparently those traps were a joke. Now we had to find another solution. I was talking to my sister in law who has the same problem with seasonal mice, and she said not to use glue traps. After talking to her I decided glue traps are definately not the way to go. The following story is gross so stop reading now until you see END OF STORY again...you have been warned. Anyway, she said one time she put down glue traps and when she came down the next morning she found a mouse who had chewed off his own foot. END OF STORY. So that was 'nuff said on that. After a little bit of research we found that people said to use Ortho Home Defense Max Press and Set traps. It comes with two traps. We bought three packs. We set two packs up and no kidding in about 10 minutes we heard it go off. We were happy that we caught the mouse and disposed of it quickly. About an hour later we heard another one go off. So we caught another one. Later that evening we caught another one. When all was said and done we caught six mice! Needless to say, after catching that many we bought more traps and set them up. We haven't caught anymore and there is no more mouse poop. Thank goodness!
I have saved the worst for last. The final pests we got were....wait for it......................fleas. Seriously, if you have never had this problem, pray that you never do. If you have had them, continue praying that they never return. Wow. Now, I have always associated fleas with filth, so I was not happy to have these disgusting things in my not filthy house. I don't know where they came from. We have been living in our home for eight years. The first couple of summers we put flea meds on our dog. But then we stopped because one summer we just never bought it and he never got fleas. So for the last five years our dog has not had flea meds. Early spring our cat started losing fur on her back, by her tail. We took her to the vet and the vet said fleas. She looked for them using that little flea comb, but didn't find anything. We said, "How can she have fleas? She's an indoor cat. We have another cat and a dog and they aren't having any issues". She basically said,"Just put flea meds on them". We didn't. They gave us steroids and we called it finished. A couple months later the same issue started. We took her back to the vet. Another round of steroids and this time I bought Frontline from Sam's Club and thought it was finished. When it happened a third time I told the vet we used Frontline and she asked if we purchased it from a vet or a store. I told her a store and she said that was bad. The meds at the store aren't the same as the vet. Even FRONTLINE. I was so mad. So we bought the stuff from the vet and came home. Then it happened...July 2. I saw one in my family room. Then I saw one on my shirt, then my daughter saw one on her bed. Eeeek! How is this happening? Well, obviously I know how, but what am I supposed to do? Again I didn't want to use any sprays so I got to work. I started vaccuuming everyday, twice a day and throwing the stuff from the vacuum away outside. I stripped every bed and washed everything. Then I went extreme. I took every washable cloth out of every inch of our house and washed it. I am not exaggerating when I say that was at least 100 loads. Luckily there was not a major issue with them in our upstairs. But we did have them on our main level and our basement, which is plenty!
I was so upset about this. I did intense cleaning every single day for about two weeks. Now that may not sound so awful but think about what this entails. Imagine moving every bit of furniture in your house every single day twice a day and sometimes three times a day. It was exhausting. I lost 10 pounds. As much as I was happy about losing that weight, I was not happy by the way the weight was lost. Add to this that my kids don't like to sleep, which means I get no sleep and a meltdown is coming soon. Finally one day I called my husband at work sobbing and said "I can't take this anymore, I don't know what to do! Can you please come home? I need to take a nap!!!"
When I finally got some sleep I could think a little more clearly and started researching the best way to get rid of fleas...naturally. Again I didn't want to use any sort of chemicals. Every thing I read said use baking soda or salt. So I sprinkled baking soda all over the carpet and left it there over night, I also put down aluminum pie pans filled with soapy water by night lights. The next morning I looked in the pans and found a couple of fleas, and I vacuumed up the baking soda and didn't see anything for about four hours. Then I saw one again. When this happened I lost it. I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it once and get it over with. The solution? Salt. Seriously. Salt. I went to Sam's Club and bought probably about 30 lbs of salt. I put it in my food processor and turned it into powder and started sprinkling all of my carpet. With this process you have to leave it on your carpet for 2 weeks. At this point my kids ages were 4 and 18 months. What was I supposed to do about keeping little kids off the carpet? I had to leave every single day and stay out ALL day, which is not typical in this household. It was exhausting. Every morning I loaded everyone up and immediately drove to my mom's house to give the kids breakfast. My mom works, so she gave us a key and we would hang out there for a while. But my kids turned into different people when we were there. They would not listen to me at all. So then we started doing things outside of her house. I had to be sort of creative to keep them busy for two weeks. This also meant no naps. Which worked well for me at bedtime because I could get them to bed earlier and easier.
Anyway, long story short, that got rid of most of them. After vacuuming up everything we didn't see anything for about a week, but I guess they must have been in the pupae stage and hatched. So we did round two of salt. This time we also purchased Bayer Advanced to spray the yard and took our pets to the vet to get put on Comfortis. The vet wasn't very happy about this, but we needed to take some drastic actions to rid ourselves of these things. So here is what we did to FINALLY get rid of them...Sprayed the front yard with Bayer Advanced bug killer, gave our pets Advantix (dog) and Advantage (cat), two weeks later gave them Comfortis, two weeks later Advantix and Advantage again, and two weeks later Comfortis again. Cut our grass as short as our lawn mower could go, salted the carpet for four weeks, and washed every bit of fabric in our house. The Bayer Advanced was used in the front yard because it is shaded, but the backyard is full sun, so cutting the grass short is all we needed to do there. Oh my goodness, it was awful and exhausting.
After all of this was said and done, I found myself disgusted with carpet. To know that those horrible creatures could live in carpet so easily made me hate carpet so this is what happened next...
This was our next project of the summer. Uggh...I'm getting exhausted just looking at these pictures. This was a big under taking. But more on that later...
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