Ants Everywhere!

If carpenter ants are anything like 'run of the mill ants' I would buy Terro liquid ant baits and watch them disappear!

I agree with B D. Terro works amazing, my brother was an exterminator and it's what he recommended to us. You just have to deal with the trail for a few days and then they magically vanish.

They don't like citrus, the acid eats through them. Wipe your countertops with fresh lemon juice daily and they won't walk on them. If you see their trails, spray or mop with any sort of citrus based cleaner. Not just a citrus smell, citrus based. Orange Clean (by the Oxy Clean people) works well. BTW, with summer coming, Orange Clean also kills wasps on contact. Plus it smells good. ;)

I had good success with keeping them out of the rooms by putting borax (laundry aisle) in their entry spots (an unused outlet and a crack in a windowsill). But that was a rental and our landlord didn't want to pay for an exterminator...
In our case they lived in the space behind the drywall and they will chew up the wood! If your find they nest or a "dump" you will recognize it by the mounds of tiny woodshavings...
So if I owned a home, I would definitely have an exterminator take care of them to protect the structure.
Good luck.

I always spray the outside foundation of the house so that the ants stay outside where they belong.

Vinegar and or bleach.

I pour a ring of Diazinon? (ant killer) around the house every few years. That does the trick. If you sprinkle a comlete ring around the house, about 2-3 feet away from the foundation, they come in contact with it before getting back in the house.

diatenacious earth... (spelled wrong), but it works. Sprinkle it where you see them, it dehydrates them.

Changing my answer- I see you said carpenter ants. These are really hard to rid of unless you find the nest. You HAVE TO LOCATE THE NEST. Don't waste your money on an exterminator unless you have found the nest and want them to spray that. They will charge you spray them directly which will not fix your problem.
Carpenter ants are most active in the evening and night hours. Put out a bait- something sugary like jelly, and follow them as they form a little line to and from the jelly. That should help locate the nest. The nest could be outside, or in your walls. If you can find out how they are getting in, you can put some carpenter ant bait there. But that will only help temporarily until you can eradicate the nest. My experience is that Terro does not help with carpenter ants.
These critters are a real pain.

Someone out here recommended Terro to me last year, and it's the ONLY thing that worked for us. Not Orkin, not Raid...nothing else.

Put it by where the ants are coming in, and it'll cause them to swarm and take the food back to the queen.

Ours were gone overnight with that stuff. And don't forget to put some outside, too. Totally child and pet safe, FYI.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/housingandcloth...

Carpenter ants, destroy wood. Not eating it, but mining into it.

I agree with the votes for Terro. We had carpenter ants and Terro took care of them and they never came back. I got really grossed out when I discovered them because we had black countertops in our kitchen and I came downstairs one morning, walked into the kitchen and it looked like the whole countertop was moving! VERY creepy! We got some Terro and the ants would form a circle around the puddle it formed. They were kinda cute in a creepy, scientific way and we got to go out to eat a few nights in a row because I refused to cook in the kitchen til they were gone! We laughed at how every morning and night we would feed the cat, feed the dog, feed the fish and then feed the ants! In a couple days they were gone. I think my husband also put some sort of chemical all the way around the house after they disappeared and we never saw them again!

What I have found to work the best is mixing sugar and Borax laundry booster together and then sprinkling it around your foundation (outside your house). It will stop the ants very quickly. You may have to do it once a month. Good luck.

Windex supposedly destroys their chemical trails.

We had just the outside sprayed and have now had 3 ant free years!

YOU HAVE TO FIND THE NEST!!!!!! We kept getting these and was using Terro which worked, but every year they would come back.

2 years ago we saw mushrooms growing out of the bottom of our siding by our back door, and I knew that it wasn't a good sign. I called a construction company to come out and take a look and OMG!!!!!

They opened up the side of the house and there were hundreds and hundreds of these ants eating our house. They had eaten a good portion of the studs and it all needed to be replaced. Once we got the side opened up we had an exterminator come out and they sprayed the nest and we had to have treatments for up to 2 months because some of the ants who were not killed in the initial nest destruction were now looking for a new home. I have not seen a single carpenter ant in the house since.

We would only see the normal black carpenter ants in the house, but when they opened up the house you should have seen these things. They were HUGE and some had wings on them. It really grossed me out and the damage they caused was incredible. They are just as bad as termites.