Mosquito Magnets

You know what I hate about this time of the year? Mosquitoes!

They are a damn menace and have a nasty habit of getting out of hand in my neighborhood especially around late summer.

Well, I have a nice surprise for those little blood suckers! I got me one of those mosquito magnets!

What, I hear you say, are mosquito magnets for heaven’s sake (read about them here: https://homesteadingnow.com/pest-control/mosquito-magnets.php)? Since when did those acrimonious little insects become magnetic?

Ha ha. Well, its not quite like that, but the device works on attracting the evil little critters and simply vacuuming them up!

Keep it Simple

It is a marvel of simplicity meets a little technological know how. The device uses a mixture of carbon dioxide, plant chemicals and moisture that attract the female mosquito (that’s the one that bites you, not the male) by simulating the attractants given off by an animal that it would like to bite! when the mosquito gets close enough, the vacuum sucks it into a bag where it dehydrates and dies.

Simple in its complexity, I say!

I got the device because I hate to use chemical sprays that for one I hate the smell of and two I’m convinced are extremely bad for a person’s health. And when you get to my age, you’re glad to have that health and don’t want some damn chemical cocktail messing with it!

Light traps are only so good and while I can keep them out of the house with mosquito nets up at the windows and doors, I can’t sit out on my patio and enjoy the late summer evenings and not attract enough of the nasty little things to cause me some damn itchy bites!

No Nasty Chemicals

So a non-chemical alternative had to be found and I believe this device is the one. It culls the mosquito population in the area by attracting all the females and killing them before they can lay their eggs and make more mosquitoes.

It also attracts them off my patio so they leave me alone and go for what they believe is more interesting several feet away!

So far so good and no bites in the last few evenings. So I’m confident that mosquito magnets are the clean way to go to beat these nasty blood sucking, disease spreading, flying insects.

Edwyn Prose

Small Bathroom Remodeling Time

That’s right, I was looking at the small bathroom I have on the first floor of my house the other day and was seriously thinking about how best to go about remodeling the room to get the best from the space available.

Now let’s face it, the room is pretty small and at present most of the space is taken up by the old bath tub, which no one even uses any more! So that got me to thinking why not rip that bath tub out and replace it with a nice shower unit? That will provide a sudden gap where the toilet can now go, freeing up one whole wall for heated towel racks and a bathroom vanity unit with a big wall mirror right behind to further create the illusion of more space.

Well, I sat down and sketched it all out on a piece of paper, as is my usual way of putting some of my more enlightened ideas onto a medium where I can better explain it. It looked pretty good, so I went down to the local bathroom store in town and had a word with their designer guy, who happens to be a friend of mine going way back.

He came over and took a bunch of measurements and went back to the store to put my plan into action. The next day, he had four options for me starting with the least expensive to the most expensive. I actually went for the second most expensive option because I liked the look of it the best and it was just perfect for how I envisaged the small bathroom remodeling plan to be.

Well, a week later, the guys brought all the stuff over, ripped out my old bathroom units and had the whole job finished inside two days. Now that’s pretty good going! I say that if you get some small bathroom remodeling ideas in your head, then you should get them down on paper while they’re stiff fresh in your mind and that way you’ll be better able to express your wishes to a professional and get a really great job done.

So I was pleased as anything since the end result was exactly what I wanted to see. My wife loved the new bathroom and it gets used a heck of a lot more than it ever did. So it was money well spent and time well used.

Edwyn Prose