If you own a home, chances are at some point you have, or will have to get rid of a wasp nest somewhere on your home or property. It isn’t all that fun, but at least when you can see the darn thing, you can come at it with a spray can of Raid at night and kill the buggars.  But what about when you suddenly notice the damn things are flying around your house, and there’s no sign of a nest? That happened to us the other day, when I was pressure washing the side of our house on a fine, warm fall day. I hit a corner of the house where the bowed out area for our patio door meets the house again. Suddenly I noticed dozens and dozens of wasps everywhere, and they’re all flying behind the inside corner strip at the top, right by the soffit. Seriously? So I do what every sane woman does in a situation like this: holler for my husband. Yeah that worked well. He didn’t have any better idea of what to do than I did, except to wait for dark.

Well, we got a can of Raid and waited, and tried to listen in the walls to see if we could figure out more precisely where they were, but no luck. We weren’t even sure if spraying up by the soffit would work. THEN we did a little Internet research and stumbled on what is turning out to be a cheap and ingenious solution to the problem. It needs just a few things most homeowners already have at thier disposal: A shop vac, a ladder, some tape or velcro, and either water and dishsoap, or bleach.

1. Put a few inches of water and a bit of soap in the shop vac. Make sure your filter is in place, and the exhaust port uncovered. ALTERNATIVELY you can put a few inches of bleach in the shop vac, no soap is needed.
2. If you have rigid extension tubes for the shop vac, connect as many together as you can (we used 4), then connect your shop vac tubing.
3. Rig it up to a ladder with tape or velcro. Get the nozzle of the shop vac right up where the wasps are going in.
4. Plug in the vac and turn in on.
5. Sit back, watch ’em get sucked in and die.

The first day we did it, we ran the shop vac for maybe 3 hours total. I’m running it a second day as there are still more wasps, although it’s slowed way down now. The goal is to get all the drones out, and eventually the queen will come out as well. When she does, your work is done.  You can plug up the area, but it’s my understanding that a new queen won’t move into an old nest.

Something to be aware of, if you do use bleach, you’ll get wasp soup. Bleach, as you might recall from high school science class, is sodium hypocholorite, and it does in fact, dissolve organic things like wasps, and rather quickly. So we aren’t too sure how many we actually caught, because by the time we took the cover off the shop vac maybe an hour after we turned it off, they were already dissolving. As a precaution, if you turn it off, make sure you disconnect the hose and COVER the opening, because if there are live wasps remaining they will fly out.  I think most of the wasps died right away, so we probably would not have needed to wait an hour.

(There are many videos about this on YouTube, so so need to add one from us.)

Unfortunately, as we walked around the house we noticed the little suckers busily trying to build new nests in a few other places. So we’ve done our best to hit those spots with the Raid, in hopes of driving them out before they’ve gotten too cozy.  I know one of the spots seemed to have a queen inspecting it, and I think we did get her, so perhaps we’ve dodged on bullet. I’m not entirely convinced we’ve dodged them all so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

A while back I had promised my mother that my husband and I would replace her kitchen flooring for her. We had gotten as far as buying the laminate flooring, then tucked it away in her garage, and there it sat for the next couple of months, not quite forgotten, but repeatedly deferred behind other projects until one week when I finally took a few days off work and we committed to getting it done for her.

My mother  lives in a townhouse and her kitchen is an open floor plan with an island, but smallish, maybe 75 sq feet. We’ve installed laminate flooring before, so felt this was a job we could handle. I told her to bring it in the house to get it warmed up and humidified for her home, and arranged for her to to have her refridgerator emptied out so we could move that. Thursday we arrived at 9 am with our tools in hand, all set to remove the old floor and bang in the new one. We figured, somewhat optimistically as it turned out, how hard could this be? We had a plan which looked something like this:

Not bad, right? About 30 minutes later we’re making our first run of the day to Menards, which if you aren’t from the area is a big box home repair store as we quickly discovered we hadn’t brought along a small trim puller to get the trim off the cupboards. Finally get that going, get the trim all off and start pulling up the old flooring. Some of it was glued, some not and of course the first piece was glued…12 feet wide! After all that was up, we decided to replace the underlaiment, as some of the old had gotten wet and was ruined. So, tear that up.

So we put down the new underlaiment, and pull out her staple gun to secure it, then found it didn’t work. We spent about 90 minutes trying to fix a $20 staple gun, because isn’t that what everyone does? We tore it completely apart, got it back together, never did figure it out. So off we went to Menards for our second trip of the day for a staple gun. Hubby spots one that looks just like something he picked up at a garage sale for $1, that one’s worked beautifully for us, so we bought it for my mom as a replacement. It’s simple to use, and easy to hold. We got back to her house, loaded it up, pressed the handle and…nuttin’. Say WHAT????  You guessed it. Defective unit. But of course we can’t just go back to Menards, we (meaning my darling spouse) wanted to try to fix it. After an hour of trying he was able to successfully reassemble it with no spare parts but never did get it to work, and we made our third trip of the day to Menards to replace it. By now of course, our simple plan was looking a lot less like “idea, plan, action” and a whole lot more like the flow chart at right.

Fortunately he is very wise, and brought along a test board, so we could test it in the parking lot before we left. Once we had proof it worked, back to my mom’s we went.

We finally got the underlaiment down, and started putting in the actual flooring. In the meantime I sent my mom off to the big box stores to see if she could get reducer strips to put between the flooring and carpet, as her old one looked horrible, and of course she couldn’t get them. (Side note: We bought her flooring at a local builders overstock warehouse, that didn’t sell the reducers.) So even though her flooring is a discontinued color, I took a chance and called customer service at the manufacturer and asked if I could still get them to match. We totally lucked out (we could!!) – which partly made up for the 3 trips to Menards. So those were ordered and arrived a week later.

We managed to get about halfway across her floor, then realized we didn’t have the jigsaw that would be needed to cut the hole for the vent in the floor. By this time it was 10 PM!  So we called it a night, and went back for day 2.

The second day went smoother than the first, but still took more time than expected, and by the time the flooring was in place, the quarter round was put back in a few places and appliances returned to their original spots, it was nearly 5 pm. The remaining quarter round was held to be repainted. (My mom’s kitchen cabinets are white, and the quarter round had gotten some dings so it needed painting/touch up.) Later we found out we’d actually left a bit too much space on the edges for the floating  floor and ended up getting new quarter round that was wider, as hers was the absolute narrowest and cheapest that her builder could buy when they built the place. Fortunately her other son-in-law has the skills to install that, along with the threshold between the carpet and flooring.

You’d think this would have made me run screaming for the hills, wouldn’t you? Nope, not in the least. In fact, it’s strangely the opposite. We need to replace the flooring in our own home, so I’m looking at it as a test run: what should we do differently when we do ours. Yes, there is quite a list we’ve compiled, from check the staple gun to verify the width of the quarter round and the hell with how much the directions say to leave for the floating floor! But after it is all said and done, I’m still glad we did it. We saved a ton of money doing this for her, and about every 2 weeks in the first two months after we finished, she sent me an email telling me how much she loved her new kitchen floor. That made everything worth it. My only regret is that we can’t get any more of it to do her entry ways by her front and garage entrys, but there’s always Craig’s List.

So many of us have thoughts and opinions about Obamacare vs Trumpcare, Medicaid vs no Medicaid, rising premiums, subsidies, etc, and the list goes on and on. l stumbled across this letter from a woman named Betsy, written to her mother with dementia, and creatively cc’d to the GOP. It’s compelling and thought provoking and I wanted to share it here.

Source: Dear Mom—about your 50 year nursing career & Medicaid… Woman’s post PLOWS the GOP