11 Easy Steps To Get Rid Of Ants In Your House

11 Easy Steps To Get Rid Of Ants In Your House

All good work should be done the way ants do things: Little by little. …

Lafcadio Hearn

Yes, ants are one of the hardest working creatures to get inspired by but they can be a pain to deal with precisely because of their relentless nature. They don’t care where they swarm, as long as they have a suitable habitat, they form a colony and march on to find food. 

As a rule, we have no concern over what they do, but when their paths cross our own, it becomes problematic. You see, while ants are not technically dangerous for us humans, they are extremely annoying. They crawl all over our foods, our grounds and make our skin squirm with discomfort.

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It is obvious that we will want to get rid of ants in these circumstances. Not much physical harm comes from it, but mental harm – certainly for anyone suffering from Entomophobia (fear of insects).

But how do you get rid of ants?

11 Best Ways To Get Rid Of Ants In Your Home

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!
Did you know

Not too long ago, the total weight of all the ants combined was greater than the total weight of the humans? While the weight of an individual and is not much amounting to just a few Milligrams, we have to remember that there are trillions of ants in the world, heck there might even be a few thousand ants living in your own backyard. 

So to get rid of ants on a large scale is neigh impossible. But that doesn’t mean that you cannot get rid of ants in your home.
The following are the 11 best ways to get rid of ants in your home or at the very least, prevent them from being a pest. 

1) Glass Cleaner and Liquid Detergent

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

Everybody has a glass cleaner or a liquid detergent at home. These things are cheap and you can find one in every local store. But how do they help in getting rid of ants? Well, the thing is, ants communicate using scents and chemical trails. Glass Cleaner and Liquid Detergent are chemicals after all and when you use them in the path that ants use to enter your home, you will essentially remove their trails.

Spray the liquid glass cleaner and/or liquid detergent and give it a gentle wipe to deter the ants from entering your home. 

2) Hand Soap

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

This works in a similar fashion to glass cleaner and liquid detergent. While the previous two removes and replaces the scent and chemical trails of ants, hand soap just removes the ant trails. 

All you need to do is give a gentle rub of the hand soap on the ant trail and wipe it clean. This can easily the ants from entering your home. This is a cheap and easy way to get rid of ants in your home.

3) Pepper

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

Pepper is not the softest of the spices when it comes to taste nor scent, some of us even find the taste of pepper annoying and irritating. If humans find this spice annoying, ants – who are more sensitive to chemicals and scents find it even more so.

This spice replaces the scent trails of ants with an overwhelming scent that irritates their chemical sensors and helps in deterring them from invading your home. All you need to do is palace a bunch of ground pepper on their trail and near your food to get rid of ants in your home.

4) Peppermint Oil

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

If you are planning to go natural and not harm the ants, peppermint is one of the best ways to get rid of ants in your home. If you didn’t know peppermint is a natural insect repellent that is great against bugs. The chemicals contained in Peppermint oil are something that bugs don’t really like

To use peppermint oil, all you need to do is:

  • Mix 10 to 20 drops of peppermint oil in 50 to 100 milliliters of water
  • Spray the mix near the entry points in your house, i.e windows and doors 
  • Let it dry

Warning – keep peppermint far away from your pets, while it is just a repellent for bugs, it can make some of our pets ill, especially cats.

5) Vinegar

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

If none of the previous methods work, it’s time to be a bit more brutal to get rid of ants in your home. If you see an army of ants near your home, you can use diluted white vinegar or diluted vinegar, in general, to kill them directly. All you need to do is:

  • Grab some vinegar
  • Dilute it with water
  • Clean your floors and hard surfaces
  • Let it dry

This method will kill ants that come near the surface before it dries. At the same time, once it dries, it will remove all the chemical and scent trails of the ants and replace them with a repulsive one. 

Don’t worry, the smell of vinegar will fade away enough to be unnoticeable for most humans rather quickly. 

6) Boiling Water

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

This is one of the most direct and brutal ways to get rid of ants in your home, When you see some ant trails, follow them and locate their colony. Once you find out the location of their colony, boil some water and pour it into the colony

This will seep into the corners and wipe out the entire colony of ants. While it may take some time to locate their colony, by using this way, you can get rid of the root of the ant problem

7) Corn Starch

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

While not as effective as boiling water, this method sure is quick and effective. If you see a large group of ants. Just pour a handful of cornstarch over ants and pour some water on top of it. 

This method is barbaric and won’t help you get rid of the root, but it is a great way to get rid of a large group of ants on the surface without relying on chemicals. Be sure to use this method along with other methods to get rid of ants in your home for the best results.

8) Neem Oil

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

This method to get rid of ants is similar to the ones using soap, pepper, and liquid detergents. The concept of this method to get rid of ants is to remove their scent and chemical trails and replace them with something that they find repulsive. 

Now while using this method to get rid of ants, be sure to use concentrated Neem Oil as the diluted ones will not function well. 

9) Coffee Grounds

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

This is great news for all those coffee freaks out there – there is a use of coffee other than getting that hit of caffeine. This may sound weird but caffeine is meant to be a poison for animals and insects. Then humans came along and began to use that poison to get hyped and stay focused. 

Naturally coffee is a great deterrent and one of the simplest ways to get ants in your home. Just be sure to brew the coffee first before sprinkling it on a disposable surface. The chemical properties of caffeine are enough to get rid of ants in your home.

 10) Borax

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

Borax is a common chemical found in household cleaners and laundry detergents. It is one of the most commonly found and widely used chemicals as well since it can be used for anything from metal forging to cleaning. To kill ants using Borax, you will need to:

  • Make a solution of borax, sugar, and warm water to make the ant bait
  • Find a container to keep the bait
  • Let the ants take in the bait.

The concept of this technique to get rid of the ants is rather simple. Sugar and warm water will act as the bait for the ants and draw the ants in. The ants will nibble and eat the bait while the borax will poison and kill the ants

You can use other sugary foods like Honey, Jelly, peanut butter, or regular butter instead of sugar for this ant trap as well. This is a passive but effective way to get rid of ants in your home.

11) Cut Off The Food Supply.

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

This is more of a preventive measure than a cure but as they say “prevention is better than cure” so this method is worth the try. You don’t need any chemicals or any other ingredients for this method to rid of the ants. All you need to do is be careful to not leave any foods out in the open and clean regularly to get rid of the food crumbs. 

Ants won’t infest your place if they don’t have a reason. The main reason why ants invade your place is that they see exposed foods and for them, food is all that matters besides their queen. 

But Before We Go,

Get Rid of Ants in your House with these 11 Easy Steps!

When none of these methods work, it’s clearly a bad situation. When the situation goes beyond your control it’s time to use pesticides and commercial ant eradicating products. You can use bait traps (similar to the borax trap but more effective). 

There are also other non-toxic ant repellents you can use to get rid of the ants as well. 

In the event that nothing works, hire a professional exterminator to remove all ants from your home. The professionals know what to do and how to effectively and permanently remove ants. 

It is important to note, however, that if you keep a messy palace and leave food in the open or crumbs all over, you will be faced with ant infestations again. So be sure to keep your place neat and tidy.

Hope this was helpful for you. If you have any suggestions for us, do let us known them down in the comments below. And as always, thank you for reading till the end.

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