The attic

The attic in my house is a dark, frightening, uninhabitable place that gets so hot in the summer that you can't be up there for more than 5 minutes at a time. In fact, I hadn't been up since we moved back. My excuse was the heat, but in reality, I was afraid of what I might find. 

The previous tenants,  as mentioned earlier, were less than tidy, and I didn't want to wander up there and find a depressing impenetrable mountain of discarded things. By things, I mean any object I didn't want for myself. I like treasure, but I was certain these slovenly renters had left none for their evil landlord.

There was also the bug issue. I knew cockroaches lay their eggs in attics because attics are relatively warm and see little human traffic. My wife and I were also hearing noises up there in the wee hours. We almost called the Ghost Hunters. Well, not really, but the scratching we were hearing was a little unsettling. I had to get up there, and take care of business before the problem got any worse. I climbed the rickety ladder one brisk September morning, and this is what I found:

"There's some in  here! Occupied!"

That's  right; a raccoon was living in our attic. I'd heard stories about rabies and other infectious diseases being spread by these sometimes irritable vagrants, and I was not going to be a part of it. So, I decided to leave the raccoon removal up to a pest control professional. 

I tell you how that went down in my next post.

Ohio has a lot of bed bugs

Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat as the last vestiges of some horrible dream faded from your memory. Maybe you were being chased in that dream. Maybe you were being eaten. I have a greater fear of the latter. This fear seemed all the more probable after hearing my friend's story about her ordeal with bedbugs. 

She'd just come back from a trip to Ohio for a conference. She stayed in a nice hotel that we will call Chilten for obvious reasons. She came back with bed bugs. I was not surprised to find out her little friends climbed aboard in Ohio after reading this wiki how article: How to Get Rid of Bed Bugs. I thought it would provide her with some tips on her new found parasitic house guests, but it was actually just a breakdown of the cities with the biggest bed bug problems. 

Ohio showed up a lot. What is it about Ohio I wonder? New York, Chicago, Baltimore? Sure. But Dayton? Maybe they're not as up to speed on pest control there, maybe the little critters have a thing for Midwestern blood. I can't say, but the topic intrigues me.

Looks nice enough to me

On to the Backyard

I like to barbecue. I like to get a big piece of meat, throw it on an open flame, and devour it. I call that a fun evening. The problem with barbecuing down here, meaning below the Mason-Dixon Line, is the mosquitoes. They're insane. And they love me. I can't tell you why. All I know is, they're drawn to me, and make no effort to allow me a peaceful summer evening in my own backyard. Lots of bites. I've tried the little scented (can't mention brands) candle things, and I've tried the outdoor foggers. They work, too. It's just the smell can really mess up a good cookout. Here's what I tried:

Ever heard of using garlic juice as a natural pesticide? I hadn't either. All you have to do is pick up a little bit of this stuff, and mix it with some water. It's actually five parts water, and one part garlic, but who's counting? You can then put it into little spray bottles and spray it around your backyard. It's supposed to work for four hours, and I can confirm that it does.

Ahh, Mother Nature

After spraying that stuff around my backyard about 30 minutes prior to my firing up the grill, I was set. I didn't get bitten once. It was awesome. Garlic actually works. I'd never used it for pest control before, but it really worked, and I love the smell of garlic, so it was a win-win. 

It Began in the Kitchen

Bugs know you have food, and they have no problem finding the food you've forgotten about. Those little crumbs that line your cabinets are essentially Subways to roaches, not subterranean transit - the fast food places. Roaches can pop into your cabinets, get a quick bite, and be on their ways, and you are none the wiser.

Here's what we found in ours when we started cleaning: croutons, pretzels, cereal, Saltines, and lots of Oreo crumbs. I swear there had to have been more outside of the boxes that occupied my cabinets than were inside the food boxes. It was like the tenants would grab a cookie or a crouton, decide they didn't want it, and chuck it back in the cabinet. Very gross. Needless to say, they didn't get their security deposit back, which couldn't have come as a surprise. I mean, they left dishes in the dishwasher. Seriously.

Anyway, in terms of pest control, crumbs are a serious no no. We sucked all of them out with a vacuum, and wiped the cabinets down with gallons of bleach. A lot of people are turned off by this smell, but it just smelled like clean to me. No more free meals, bugs. These cabinets were clean.

The oven, as I'm sure you may have assumed, was also a mess. And don't think because it's an appliance that gets really hot that roaches won't pop in for a bite. I found a cooked one in the back. Want to know how I cleaned the oven? Sure you do. I pulled out the racks and soaped them in soapy water, turned on the automatic oven cleaner, waited several hours, then cleaned out the inside with aerosol cleaner.

Thanks, for tidying up, guys!

The rest of the kitchen was fairly self explanatory. It involved brooms and mops, you know the deal. I did have a heck of a time with the garbage disposal, however. The smell emanating from that thing was unbearable. Luckily, I found a blog with some helpful tips on garbage disposal cleaning. That was a real headache. Those things aren't exactly accessible.

When we were done with the kitchen, I could almost hear the bugs lamenting. They'd lost the best soup kitchen in town, and I intended to keep hitting them where it hurt.

Where I Draw the Line

When we got back, we went through the usual rigmarole people endure when moving into a house -- unpacking boxes, working out the utilities headaches, and arranging furniture. But there was another variable most people don't have to deal with when they move into a new home -- we were more than aware of the home's former glory.

The fun part. Check out that efficient stacking.

People moving into a new home typically see it as a blank slate, but I had a mental picture of my once-glorious house, and it bore little resemblance to this messy thing I was now sleeping and showering in. I wanted to restore the neatness, because I believe, in neatnesss there is serenity. There were gutters that needed cleaning, walls that needed painting, hinges that needed fixing, and appliances that need purchasing. Less we not forget the roaches. After a roach crawled over my face one evening, I made bugs my top priority.

I'm not naive now. I know it's impossible to completely eradicate insects from a home in this neck of the country. They are a fact of life down here. The neatest house will eventually will be visited by a spider or a pesky cricket. But cockroaches can be dealt with. And I intended to do just that.

An Introduction is in Order

I'm fairly familiar with the blogging world. This is definitely not my first rodeo. If you're kind enough to mentally ingest any of my posts, you may happen upon a link or two that looks like this: pest control. Don't be alarmed, the links point to a trustworthy site I have a tangential fiscal relationship with, but also stand behind in terms of the service they offer. Feel free to check them out from time to time. Anyway, onward and upward!

Let's start with why I'm writing this post. I just moved back into a house I've owned for about ten years. My wife, son and I were in Baltimore for a couple years, and rented the house to some college kids in the interim. The tenants didn't do any real damage to the property while we were up North, but there was significant neglect in terms of the property upkeep. 

Our "rancheriffic" abode -- a fixer-upper indeed. 

Let's just say there were bugs, lots of bugs. And this is the deep South. The bugs aren't to be trifled with down here. They're big and ornery. I've talked with people from different regions of the country who were thrown by the sheer volume of these things too. They're everywhere, and they find a new reason every season to come inside your home and make themselves comfortable. 

When we got home, the bugs had taken over the place. I don't know if the tenants had been a little on the untidy side, or if it had to do with the fact that an exterminator hadn't come calling in 700+ days. Either way, something had to done. My family was not going to share a home with a million cockroaches and numerous unidentifiable creepy crawlies.