Flylady Update

It's been an unusual week on the Flylady front this week.  After a month of quite in depth cleaning of the house, I just didn't feel like doing any cleaning over the Bank Holiday Weekend and intended to clean Zone 5 or the living room at the end of this week. 

I had forgotten that where a week  is spread between the last few days of one month and the first few days of another, you are required to clean in two zones, i.e. Zone 5 and Zone 1 in this instance, so I found myself playing catchup before I'd even done anything.

In the end, due to some specific occurences  this week, I decided to jump to Zone 2 this week and clean the kitchen, and then clean Zones 5 and Zones 1 next week, before returning to Zone 3 the week after that and then being completely back on track.

The reason for this change was an infestation of fruit flies in our kitchen.  Every summer we tend to get a few fruit flies flitting about around the compost containers, and to be honest they've never really bothered me that much, but this year was different as a few fruit flies led to a full scale infestation with hundreds of the things flying around the kitchen. It was gross.

I googled a few natural solutions and tried them, i.e. leaving out the dregs in a wine bottle to trap them, and also leaving out various containers containing vinegar. I also tried swatting quite a few, but I didn't really enjoy this as it seemed too violent a death.  The former solution did work to a small extent, but the problem was just getting worse and I felt I had to get on top of it, so I brought in the big guns and bought a fly trap and some fly spray.

An evening of exterminating them followed and I think we're now down to the last few, which I'm hoping to completely extinguish in the next day or so.  I don't enjoy killing any of God's creatures, but these little flies are a real nuisance and were expanding in number at great speed. Something really had to be done.

As a consequence of attacking them with a noxious spray, I decided that the kitchen would definitely need cleaning to remove any traces of the toxic spray and the many dead bodies. OH decided to help me by pulling out the fridge freezer to see if it was where they were breeding and I got the chance to clean behind and under it, which I haven't done for a long time and did want to do the next time I was in this zone.

I've still got to clean the cupboard fronts, windows and work surfaces in this zone, but these are the main jobs I will be doing in this zone this month as it is still pretty clean from a few weeks ago.

I do think that I inadvertently encouraged the flies by using an isopropyl alcohol cleaner on the cupboard fronts when cleaning last month.  After researching about fruit flies I came to realise that they are attracted to alcohol, so I certainly won't be using this cleaner again in the kitchen to avoid the same thing happening.  Be warned, it's ability to cut through grease is not worth the hassle of trying to resolve a fruit fly infestation!