apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Herbs can be used to make a pesticide that's safe to use at home (particularly for those who have pets or small children.) We had ants when I was 16, and I whipped up some tincture-- like a good little teenaged wiccan -- that banished them. The recipe is probably google-able.

I have pet rats... they are the sweetest little stink bugs that ever lived. They aren't vermin... they are cuddly. Really. :)

(I think if I saw a real-non-pet-store rat though, I would be scared.)

holy bajeeez i have lived with the worst... bedbugs. renters in big cities beware... you get what you pay for! i think the building i lived in had an infestation and the landlord didn't really care to treat it. bedbugs and other bugs like roaches also seem to love bigger buildings... just more people = better chance of having unwanted visitors.

right now i am in a lovely 2 flat and the current problem are squirrels that seem insistent in getting in. my landlord is awesome and is trying to remedy the situation.

bugs are definitely way worse that cold squirrels. i think.

I saw a rat a few times outside running along the fence. He is eating the left over bird seeds. He is not a problem and he is kinda cute. I am not worried about having any in the house they are more afraid of me and my JRT.

Its really important not to kill off every critter especially with pesticides. If I get a spider in the house I just trap them and take them out back.

My friend uses baby powder where he gets ants it redirects them back to where they came from or something like that.

a rat? they breed like roaches, albeit smaller numbers. gestation is 28 days and they live for one year. that's a lot. plus, they can chew threw almost every known substance.

I take issue with the notion that moles are pests to be "gotten rid of". They are harmless creatures. It's also incorrect (and not too helpful for much of rainy Oregon) that the way to get rid of them is to stop watering you lawn. Moles are carnivores, and eat grubs and worms. The way to banish them is to get rid of their food source (there are some non-poisonous means, such as BT and nemotodes). They aren't eating your plants or the roots of your lawn. My advice is to get rid of the water-wasting lawn.

I have to deal with wood rats and house mice getting into my home constantly. I've live-trapped the mice, but it's so stressful for them that they often mutilate themselves trying to get out of the traps. So now I catch them in (lethal) snap traps. You look for a place along the baseboard or the edge of a doorway, where they cannot avoid the trap. It helps to lean a board over the trap to make a dark tunnel. The snap traps with the fake plastic cheese (it's scented) work best. I'll boost the bait with a dab of peanut buter for difficult mice.

Rats often get into my attic, even though I seal up the openings. I chase them out of there by putting a bowl of ammonia in the attic. Then I look for their trail outside (their poohs and smears of dirt from their oily coats along exterior walls). I bait a rat snap trap with a nut superglued to the bait pad, and put a tiny dab of peanut buter on the nut. Place the trap facing the wall and snug up against it. Lean a board against the wall to make a tunnel. Nine times out of ten I get the rat. (Keep pets away from rat traps. They can break bones!)

Warning about wood rats: Their babies attach to the mother's nipples like kangaroo joeys, and nurse for a few weeks. So if you trap a nursing mom, you might be faced with euthanizing her attached babies. I can't do this, so I wait until I can see the rat I'm dealing with, and I make sure she or he is traveling solo.

As for ants that get into the kitchen (not carpenter ants), I have had success with a borax syrup bait that I buy online. A few drops of it along the ant line, and the workers take it back to the nest. In a few days, no more ants.

The last apartment building became infested with rats after a fire in one of the units blocked the garbage men from coming in to dispose of the garbage. I certainly did not find it cute, especially when the landlord did not take the appropriate measures to contain the trash and dispose of it in a timely manner. Rats carry disease, they poop and pee on stuff as they walk across it (including your countertops, cabinets, etc if they get INTO your house), and they are very hard to get rid of in a lot of cases. I decided to move because even after the landlord was cited by the health dept, the problem was not getting any better. So glad I left, because the neighbors have said that with the recent rainstorms, it is even worse!
I can live with ants (cinnamon, corn starch, paprika, and black pepper all work wonders in keeping them from coming inside) and the occasional spider, but rats or roaches - NO WAY!

an old roommate saw a mouse skitter across the kitchen floor (thank god i never saw it, the story of it freaked me out enough) and was all, eh, no big deal. i bought some traps and never caught anything or heard/saw anything more, so maybe the mouse just got lost that one time. my landlord bought us a couple gadgets we plugged into the wall that supposedly emitted a sound that pests couldn't stand, but we couldn't hear. i have no idea if it worked or not, but like i said, no more mice.

i also read that planting mint all around your house is supposed to help, as apparently a lot of pests hate mint. i'm not sure ants do though, because every time it rains here they come on in and end up swarming the minty mouthwash bottle (ew).

Baby opossums used to come into the house through the cat door for late-night kibble snacking. Putting a magnetic latch on the system kept them out.

But not before a racoon came in for the same thing, scared the bejezuz out of me in the middle of the night whereupon I scared the coon out of it and it ran to hide under my bed.

tip: don't try to shoo a racoon out from under your bed. Stand on top of your bed ranting and freaking out to solve that particular problem.

Akostala, I tried the mint theory with mint extract on cotton balls (in small dishes). The mice walked right over them. It's an old wives' tale.

I just keep everything chewable in the refrigerator. No, really, it's the only thing that works for me. I live in a rickety basement apartment and knew I'd reached the point of no return the night a rat galloped up to me as I lay on my couch, stood on his hind legs and begged for food. What the heck, I tossed him a pita chip. He spat it out. OMG the nerve!

A great tip that I use for vermin (in Australia) is snake poo in the attic. Vermin are naturally scared of anything that can eat them and will quickly clear out of there. You can ask at pet stores that have snakes if you can have a handful and just scatter it around the roof, or place in muslin bags.

Of course friends of mine got rid of all their vermin by actually having a 2 metre long carpet snake in the attic that decided it was a nice place to live. Not sure which one they would have preferred.

We live in a not-that-old-but-still-kind-of-old building that was probably built 40-50 years ago. Under the sink, there was a big hole where the plumbing was. In the middle of the winter I started hearing things rattle under there (I'm a light sleeper where as my SO litteraly slept through an earthquake) but didn't make most of it. We opened the cubert door to change the garbage bag and there was a giant hole in it, mouse droppings (well, I don't know if they were rat or mouse droppings but they were small so...) and corn seeds everywhere. Boyfriend patched the big hole, cleaned thoroughly with vinegar and all. They are not back (as of now...).

Not that pleasant. Those things are loud though.