Invaded

A few weeks ago we started noticing these little tiny bugs in the kitchen and in the pantry. Some of them were flying around in the pantry and we caught a couple on some shelves and the fruit that we had on the kitchen counter had them too. After asking pretty much everyone we know and doing some research - we found out that they were little tiny beetles. We're still not sure were we got them, but we think it was from the Farmer's market. They were able to get in to pretty much everything - even things that hadn't been opened yet. The advice that we found said that we should throw everything away, and vacuum the pantry and counters.

This was our pantry before. I stockpile because I'm one of those people that don't like going to the store so I get a lot while I'm there and then can make pretty much anything at any time because I already have it in the house.

This is our pantry now - after a trip to the grocery store.

I had to throw away all of my baking stuff - which was a LOT. I had all kinds of chocolate, and nuts and such. It just made me sick. All of my new baking stuff is going into airtight glass containers. Eventually - I'll make some pretty labels for them.

We were able to keep quite a bit of spices, but had to throw out even more.

We didn't have to throw away any can goods, so we were thankful for that. But we did have to throw away all of our pasta, rice and cereal so now I only buy what we are going to use that week or in the next few days. I bought containers for our cereal though.

When it was all said and done - it took 11 contractor (74 gallon) trash bags to clean out the pantry. I wiped down all the shelves and then vaccumed them. There weren't any bugs so we went to Wal-Mart to get containers and some bug spray and we came back and there were about 30 bugs in the pantry. I sprayed the whole pantry down that night and when I woke up the next morning - there were dead bugs everywhere! They must have been hiding in there. The shelves of our pantry are removable so I took them all out, sprayed underneath and behind, sprayed the floor and all of the walls and the ceiling every day until I had used the entire bottle of spray. We never saw any more bugs after the first time. Then, I wiped everything down with colorox and mopped the floor. I waited another couple of days before I moved everything back in to the pantry and so far - so good. We haven't seen any bugs. Here's hoping we don't get invaded again!