Fifth Avenue Forum

The general consensus I see online is that Terro liquid ant bait is the surefire best way to kill those little bastards. Any other suggestions?

The general consensus I see online is that Terro liquid ant bait is the surefire best way to kill those little bastards. Any other suggestions?

Regular ants or carpenter ants? Either way, bait is the way to go.

For regular ants, Terro works very well. Kills the whole colony fairly quickly. I actually just set a Terro bait station in a kitchen cabinet last night after finding they had got into a bag of cookies. They had the bait station covered in half an hour, and were busily taking it back to their nest.

For carpenter ants, I got 2 baits a few years ago online (sugary gel - Maxforce, and protein based granules - Advance) that wiped them out in a week or so.

Regular ants. Carpenter ants skeeve me out big time Thanks, I am going to go commit some ant genocide when I get home.

I can try to research this to infinity and beyond, but does anybody have a *personal* experience with removal of an in-ground pool? We are looking for a new house, and a lot of homes in the area we intend to move to have pools. I am 100% certain we don't want to have it on our property, but at the same time limiting ourselves to homes without pools leaves us with very few choices.

Basically, I am trying to determine whether it's enough to do (cheaper) breaking of the basing floor and filling the rest vs. (expensive) complete removal. The biggest worry about filling are the "horror stories" about muddy backyards, ground sinking/shifting, etc...

The contractor that built our house dug a huge trash pit to burn leftover framing materials, instead of paying for a dumpster an extra week or two. The joys of a house built on spec.

Anyway, he filled the pit in and we eventually sodded and put an irrigation system in. 10 years later, we have a large pit-sized depression where the soil has gradually sunk into the burn pit.

You'll want to be very careful filling a pool in, especially if you have small kids playing back there.

That's hilarious

The contractor that built our house dug a huge trash pit to burn leftover framing materials, instead of paying for a dumpster an extra week or two. The joys of a house built on spec.

Anyway, he filled the pit in and we eventually sodded and put an irrigation system in. 10 years later, we have a large pit-sized depression where the soil has gradually sunk into the burn pit.

You'll want to be very careful filling a pool in, especially if you have small kids playing back there.

Thanks!

Now, I have zero experience with these issues, but - in cases like yours, would it be doable to fill-in the new depression?

Absolutely. The grass doesn't grow well there, as the irrigation layout doesn't work well. I got a price of $400 to dump topsoil on it and add grass seed. I haven't done it yet, but probably would do so should we need to put the house on the market.

The depression is about 18-24" below the lawn height, at its lowest point.

I'm not sure how readily available fill is where you live, but I bought triaxles of fill dirt for berming around our sand mound and it was $200 per load.

I needed 12.

I'd imagine you'll need at least 20 to fill in a pool.

You could get lucky and just put up a sign "free fill wanted".

I wouldn't want to simply fill the pool with dirt and call it a day. At the very least, you need to drill holes at the bottom of the pool, then fill it with stone to a certain point, and then add dirt. An old friend of ours went through this years ago, but I forget all of the details.

Stone was $400 a load, best of luck

My parents had a house in Latrobe. They wanted to save on insurance so they broke up their pool and filled it in. They never had issues but moved out about 5 years later so who knows what it looks like now.

Pretty useless contribution on my part but how often does this come up?

I wouldn't want to simply fill the pool with dirt and call it a day. At the very least, you need to drill holes at the bottom of the pool, then fill it with stone to a certain point, and then add dirt. An old friend of ours went through this years ago, but I forget all of the details.

There are actually several companies in my area directly specializing in pool removal/filling. You not only have to drill the holes at the bottom, but also "saw off" the top parts of the pool. Ultimately, the trade-off I will be facing if we indeed buy a house with a pool is:
A) to pay about $6,000 to get it filled, but the concrete in the ground will have to be declared if we ever sell the house + it will interfere with root growth of future trees + no real structure can be built on top + the filled soil can shift down + some people say that even with the floor broken and holes drilled, the lawn will still retain too much water and will get muddy
B) to pay for the complete removal - but that costs over $15,000.

On top of that, I will feel bad for spending money on a destruction of a perfectly functional - albeit completely useless for us - house feature. The problem is that in the area we intend to move, good houses open very infrequently. And many of those "good houses" have some of the stupidest floor plans ever designed. So, if we find a decent house where the pool is the only obstacle...

I love that our neighbors have an in-ground pool we can use whenever we want, but no way in hell would I ever want to have one in my yard.

Wanted to try something new in the garden this year, so I went out and bought five kiwi plants and two raspberry bushes. The raspberry bushes seem to be growing quite well, but the kiwi plants look like somebody torched them after a week. What a waste of money.

I would have been better off throwing my money into a furnace KLF-style.

I love that our neighbors have an in-ground pool we can use whenever we want, but no way in hell would I ever want to have one in my yard.

In other words, pools are like boats...

Wanted to try something new in the garden this year, so I went out and bought five kiwi plants and two raspberry bushes. The raspberry bushes seem to be growing quite well, but the kiwi plants look like somebody torched them after a week. What a waste of money.

I would have been better off throwing my money into a furnace KLF-style.

You’re garden will slowly become a raspberry garden. Don’t get me wrong, I love raspberries, but they are pretty invasive.

My uncle had a 1-acre backyard with a 20'x40' area fenced off for a vegetable garden. Raspberries grew like a vine on the fencing, and I would pick that thing clean.

There’s only one man who would dare give me the raspberry!

Lone Star!

Wanted to try something new in the garden this year, so I went out and bought five kiwi plants and two raspberry bushes. The raspberry bushes seem to be growing quite well, but the kiwi plants look like somebody torched them after a week. What a waste of money.

I would have been better off throwing my money into a furnace KLF-style.

You’re garden will slowly become a raspberry garden. Don’t get me wrong, I love raspberries, but they are pretty invasive.

that's ok, there's nothing else in it. not now, anyways.

I think our thermostat finally bit the dust...it is reading like 102 for a temperature in the house, have tried resetting, cleaning, etc. I think I'm going to get the Nest, from everything I read the cheaper model is actually just as good, if not better.

I'm 99.9% thrilled with my Honeywell RTH9580WF, and would still get it over the Nest 10 out of 10 times. While I did look at the Ecobee because of the remote sensors, I didn't like what I read about the actual thermostat, so I never made the switch.

We decided to rip up carpeting, ceramic tile, and linoleum in our living room, kitchen, and dining room and put down vinyl planks the whole way through. I severely underestimated what a dodint it is to tear up ceramic tile.

Ran to Home Depot at lunch and grabbed the Nest E, and took about 10 minutes to remove the old thermostat and install a new one. l love it already. It is slick.