Ants in my pants!

With an old house, there comes a lot of character. Sometimes that character is charm. Other times it's quirks. Often it's in surprises, like the one we've been getting. I'm not talking about the creaking of the floor in the quiet of night, or when you jump as the furnace kicks on, fearing an explosion... I'm talking about the residents of this house. Not the former occupants, but this home's residents. They've obviously lived here a long time, long enough to form secret passages and know the ins and outs of the house. We thought it was the rain, bringing in some ant activity (maybe a party?) that got rained out, but as the days progressed, and the numbers increased, we started rethinking our strategy, (which at that time was to keep the house clean and put out ant traps).
Well, after waking up Sunday morning to ants all over the kitchen, we started realizing the problem on our hands. We used cinnamon around the holes we knew they were coming from-which works by the way!
But when yesterday we awoke to lines of ants crawling up the kitchen cabinets and into the cereal...we got down and dirty. If we had an adequate vacuum that had enough power to suck them up, we'd be less likely to jump to our 2nd resort...fogging.
We had actually purchased 6 fumigators for use with the spiders-don't get me started-which we used on the ants too. The downside...getting the house ready for fumigation. (seriously...why don't people just spray for bugs?) This task wouldn't have been so daunting had we been in a real "vacation" home. Now THIS particular house appears to us to be a project that the kids didn't want to take on after mom and dad died. There are knick-knacks everywhere, family pictures and albums left in the drawers, and old, useless appliances in the cupboards. Whatever. We still had to cover it. So we packed up our food, and bagged the plates and cutlery. We left the house for 3 hrs- during naptime mind you-, and came back to a pleasant odor, and no ants.

I was pretty sure this had done the trick, unless the ants went into their holes and hid from the poison. This morning I found a few crawling around the bathroom floor, but they dissappeared a while later (scouts, maybe? "The coast is clear"!) We've been pleased not to see any ants today. Thanks to the Edwards' for helping make it happen!