Ants love to enter our homes, taking advantage of the shelter, water and food crumbs found in a typical residence. One place they particularly love to invade is the bathroom, where they can find ample water and sometimes even food for themselves and the rest of their colony.
If ants are finding your home a little too comfortable, but you don't want to resort to toxic pest sprays, you'll be happy to hear that there are plenty of home remedies for ants that are sure to get them out of your bathroom.
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Ants in the Bathroom
While most ways to get rid of ants apply to the whole house, the first thing you need to do is figure out why they are specifically in your bathroom. If you have ants in your bathroom, it's usually a sign that you have cracks in your walls as well as either standing water, leaking water, a dirty trash can or hair in your drain. The first thing you need to do is discover how the ants get in the bathroom and what they are doing once they're in there.
When you find out how the ants are getting into your bathroom, use caulk to seal up any cracks or crevices they are using to enter the room. If you can find how they entered your home in the first place, you should also seal up any entry routes on the outside of your home, but this isn't always possible, especially if the ants have actually moved into the walls of your home.
Eliminate the Attracting Factor
Next, figure out what the ants are going after, whether it's water, hair that is fermenting in the drain, a dirty trash can or something else. Once you figure out what is attracting them, the best natural way to get rid of ants is to eliminate the thing attracting them to your bathroom in the first place.
If you have standing or dripping water providing them with a source of hydration, you'll need to figure out how to keep the bathroom dry. That could mean fixing a drain or leaky faucet or simply wiping the extra water out of your shower after you use it.
If the ants are going down the drain, you might not be able to do much to stop them from getting water down there, but you can see if there is hair or fungus in your drain that could be supplying them with food. If that's the case, clean your drain thoroughly, and hopefully they will stop coming in.
If they seem to be attracted to something in your trash can, cabinet or medicine cabinet, figure out what they are eating and clean it, throw it away or at least move it until they stop coming in your bathroom. For example, a dirty trash can should be cleaned, and a cracked container of sugary medicine should be thrown away.
Getting Rid of the Ants
Once you've gotten rid of the ants' access points and the things attracting them, you can also use a natural ant repellent made from essential oils to further discourage them from coming into your bathroom. To do this, just use scents the ants find unattractive, such as tea tree, clove, lemon, orange or peppermint and add them to a spray bottle.
A good mix can be made with 20 drops of both tea tree and peppermint oils with enough water to fill the spray bottle. As a bonus, while the ants hate this smell, it is quite pleasant for us humans. Spray the mixture throughout the bathroom wherever you saw ants crawling before in order to eliminate the trails they used.
Because this oil is so strong, a bonus of using tea tree oil is that it can also serve as a natural ant killer if any ants do still decide to enter your bathroom despite the fact that they find the scent so repulsive. You can even make the mixture a little stronger by adding a dash of cayenne pepper.