Numerous suggestions in the above, including one I mentioned to your Eric: [from the comments in the link above] “Then we bought a small box of “Grant’s Kills Ants” stakes. All of the ants in the entire yard and house were wiped out in a couple of days. Inside, you just put them on the floor under furniture. The poison container is made of metal, so your cats won’t be able to chew into it and enjoy the arsenic. One box of Grants every spring is all I’ve needed to be totally ant free”

back to the ants:
my boss told me to get the perimeter of the house sprayed with some kind of non-toxic chrysanthemum stuff…it might be worth doing because we should, unfortunately, also get the crawl space treated against beetles, which is an unfinished item from the pest report, when we bought the house. of course, it would be nicer to not have to pay somebody to address the problem…

I can help you here as I have the same problem if not careful. As I
suspect everyone in our neighbor does….

First I have Poison Free Ant & Roach killer… This helps some.

Second About every other week to once a month depending on how bad they
are this year from June till Oct I put out new Ant and Baits next to key
points under the house so the cats & kids can’t get to them. This is of
course poison.

Third you cannot leave any water, or protein foods unsealed or really out
of the fridge. The ants preferred foods are Ham, Chicken and Tuna. On the
other hand we’ve left fruit out and not an ant to be found if we’ve
followed the below, but put a drop of tuna juice I give them 30 seconds
to show up.

Fourth once their paths are established my suggestion is washing with
watered down bleach once it dry then spraying the Poison free ant spray.

Of course if you can fill any cracks they are coming in through but as
far as I can tell they’ll make their own if they can’t find one already
available. This keeps the ants from walking away with the children and
cats.

Oh and so you know, this has been a MILD YEAR so Far.

One year even though I dislike using poison in the house itself, we set
off bug booms in and under since NOTHING at all was working.

For Erin W: another way to get fruit flies is to put out a dish of vinegar (any type but distilled) with a little dishwashing soap in it. The flies are attracted to the vinegar and are - apparently - too dumb not to land in the liquid. The soap weakens the surface tension enough that the flies fall in and drown. It works, it’s nontoxic and it’s cheap.

This company sells a fantastic natural insecticide under the “general care items” section.
http://www.fowl-play.com/
We go through a bottle of it every summer combating fruit flies. And occasionally to do in a wolf spider from afar if Eric isn’t around to kill it.