Hello Everyone, You are all right. All your methods work. We all fall into the trap of it doesn't work anymore. OR 24 hrs and they are back. All I can say is you have to look at your situation and be smart. If you live in an apartment, expect roaches. If you live near a restaurant, expect rats. If you live in a house with landscape, expect spiders, ants and mice. Bottom line. MICE: Look around before you open the door, and don't leave your doors open. Make your screen doors snug around the edges. Try to screen off your roof vents or openings with metal screen. Plug up holes with steel wool. Leave traps up year round and eventually they will be gone. If not for good, a long time. An old building was demolished across our street and it took a year to get rid of them as they were looking for a new home. Been there!! ANTS: Its not just you.....what about your neighbor. My neighbor was collecting soda bottles outside his house as I discovered.......which created a SUGAR ANT SUPER COLONY. Guess where they decided to live?....That's right!!! in my garden. Borax and sugar bombs worked great. However, they were only control devices. We had to open up the ground and burst the colony, then spray. We left bombs inside and out, as well as next to all the ant ports. Eventually.......gone. But.....they are never gone, so don't be fooled. We also used bates of three Brand names....only temporary. Borax bombs worked best. ECO SPRAY Seems to do a good job. We also use peppermint and lemon essential oil as a spray to finish coat on our counters and other areas where they might wonder. Just a quick coat before we go to bed and no visitors in the morning. They hate that stuff and so do spiders. The spray mix so far does not damage anything. We use consumable essential oil...in other words we can eat it. If you need help getting some, I can direct you where to get it. We noticed in our new home that we had a different kind of ant. A protein ant as others have stated. So we left some ice cream on the counter all night for two days. Not a single ant. But, when we used a frying pan, and even washed it.....they came to visit again. Soooo............here are some tips. Ask the correct questions first. What are they going after? How big are they? What is our weather like? Where are they located? (Kitchen, Bathroom, Shower). Can I trace the ant trail outside? Do I think the nest is inside? Once you have done that...take it from there. SPIDERS: They really are a pain. Lots of trees? Lots of spiders. Lots of junk? Lots of spiders. And so on. Don't give them a home or opportunity, and you wont have a problem. Lemon pledge, Lemon and peppermint essential oil spray, keeping your house orderly, and window sills clear will help a lot. We use our diffuser with essential oils and they don't seem to appear anymore. I leave essential oils in bottle caps under the couch, closet and hidden corners, and again no appearances. Determine what type of spider you have the most in the same way you did with the ants. Sometimes they are just lost checking out your house and trying on your shoes!! (Joking) Do some reading and try different things. I read once where a couple had a super spider invasion and could not get rid of them. They were in everything and everywhere. When any pest problem gets to this level.............call a professional. ****No matter how you slice it....you share space with all of these creatures because your dwelling is on the ground somehow, and someway. You don't have to kill every spider you see...just keep it from coming in. You get what you put into it!! Bottom line. If you want to get rid of them....you have to go the extra mile. If you go the extra mile as I did when I dug up the ant colonies.......you get the big results. Like everything else in your house............its work. And it has to be done. And remember...the BUGMAN is like your Auto Mechanic.....do you think he will tell you everything!!??? It's up to you!!!!! Good Luck.

tigerdawn - As Dawn said, it is an ant bait. A few will crawl into the little hotel and die but others will take it back to the hill. It worked amazingly well for me. There is an indoor type and an outdoor type, but in our store both of them are in the garden shop. We have lots of ant problems here so I was very glad to find Terro. We recently got new kitchen cabinets and when they removed the old ones, there were little tunnels behind the cabinets. At first we thought it was termites but there were no signs of termite damage. We sprayed it down, then sprayed bleach back there before installing the new cabinets. For the next two weeks, I fought ants everyday so I knew we had disturbed their hiding place although we hadn't seen ants at the time. I tried several things before I discovered Terro. One of my neighbors had used it and told me where to find it. Our area seems to get a lot of ants and spiders. Almost everyone I know here powerwashes the outside of their house at least once a year to remove spider webs.

We are having the same problem here in SoCal - Anaheim area. Our house is 40 years old and I am sure they have just built a colony under the cool slab. Recently, I was converting the bathroom to a dual sink and had to cut into the slab and uncovered a colony right in the middle of the house under the slab. The little buggers just crawl through any crack. They will also, much to my dismay, chew away at plastic, caulking and grout, until they get a hole big enough to come through. I also hate to use pesticide, but my wife found out that Simple Green is lethal to the little pests. And the effects are long term, too, i.e. they will not come back to that spot, provided you don't wipe it down clean again. They also seem to be driven by extreme heat, such as we are having right now in SoCal. I think they come out looking for water and other food sources, when it gets very dry and hot. My only blessing in the dark cloud is that 1) they don't bite or sting, otherwise it would be a whole different story, and horror one at that; 2) there aren't any subterranian termites under my house, since ants and termites are mortal enemies. I am going to try the boric around the house and see if that doesn't help. I know that their colonies are not hundreds or thousands of ants, but literally millions of them, and they are highly organized and intelligent for ants, which makes it frustrating. I can see them communicating which in itself it fascinating, but scary, too. But like I said, try Simple Green inside the house.

"Upon examining our lease....it was discovered that I did not initial half of the places that required it on our lease. I also did not sign the very important section regarding DEFAULT BY RESIDENT. My roomate DID initial all of these places and did sign. The only portion my SIGNATURE is on....is the deal page where it talks about rent and deposit calculations. Is there any legal way for us to break this lease without having to pay?" NOPE! Contracts cover "reasonable interpretation", and minor omissions don't make up for your signing the big spots. I had a tenant try to weasel out of a lease: a typo made it for a negative one year (started in 1996 and ended in 1995) ... and they decided the lease was invalid a couple of months into the term and moved out. I sued them for the rent they owed, they said "the dates are wrong, the lease is invalid" and the judge said "Typos don't count, pay the nice landlord!". What you can do: whenever the music runs past 9 or 10PM, call the cops about a loud party. Whenever the upstairs kids are stomping and yelling, call the manager and ask him to shut them up.