How to keep ants out of your home: follow these preventive steps to keep ants from invading your house.

That being said, there are some preventive measure that you can take to keep the ants away.

• Clean up all food debris, crumbs, and open beverages.  Leaving open food and food debris out only serves to attract the ants to a potential food source.  And, as we know, they come in numbers.
• Don’t leave trash lying around the house.  If your trash can is filling up, take out the garbage bag, tie it off, and stick it in your garage or outside.  Large amounts of smelly trash tend to attract ants (as well as roaches, mice, vagrants, etc).  
• Make sure that your dishes are clean before you put them back in the cupboard.  Dishes with food residue will quickly be noticed by those stealthy, 6-legged intruders that we loathe so much.
• Before throwing cans and jars in your recycling bag/box, get the a quick rinse in the sink.  Removing the food particles will cut down on the ant’s food supply in your house.
• Got a cat or dog?  If so, then you probably leave food laying around.  Guess what?  Ants will home

Ok, you cut off the food supply in your house. Now, let’s make sure that they can’t even get IN the house.

• Keep your doors and windows sealed.  Holes in your screen?  Patch em and keep the ants where they belong: outside!
• Keep those gutter clean; otherwise, you will be opening up an ant bordello.
• Why build an ant highway?  Keep trees and bushes trimmed up and away from your home. 
• If you keep firewood laying around, it is time to burn it…Or move it away from your house.  Ants aside, termites like to lounge in firewood.  Trust me, you don’t want these critters gnawing on your home.  Do yourself a favor and move the firewood away.

Follow these steps, and you will be on your way to an ant-free zone in your home.

1. Make sure all the food in your house is sealed, so that the ants can’t get to it. The ants, having nothing to eat, will go elsewhere. This works because the ants are following the chemical trails left by other ants, who did find food.
2. Use laurel leaves to keep the ants away from a specific place. Put laurel in your sugar container.
3. Use chalk to keep ants away from kitchen areas. You will be amazed to see how they move away from any chalk lines – make sure you plan these carefully however.
4. Corn meal is another good alternative. This method is especially great around pets or children, as corn meal by itself is not poisonous. The ants will carry it home and try to eat it, but they can’t digest it properly. Be sure to put corn meal wherever you see that the ants like to frequent.
5. Use boric acid, a natural derivative of the mineral “boron”, used in borax, and also in saline solution. It is about as harmful to humans as table salt.
   1. Buy it at the local drug store (about $2 a bottle).
   2. You can pour a tablespoon of maple syrup (or anything you know ants love) on a flat plate or saucer.
   3. Sprinkle the boric acid around the syrup so that the ants must walk through it to get to the syrup; try using a q-top or small stick to ensure a good distribution of the powder around the the syrup.
6. Put out uncooked Cream of Wheat. When the ants eat it, it expands, and boom!