Home Bar Blog

This past weekend marked the NFL football season opener and for those who like to watch the game in style, a Home Sports Bar is just the ticket.
Sure it’s fun going to the game, especially at the venerable Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin to watch our favorite Packers, win  or loose, it’s a blast! Yesterday we were lucky enough to get tickets on the 50 yard line in row five right behind the Packers bench, here’s a shot or two of #4.

  
However I digress…staying home can also be fun, especially when it’s 20 below and blizzard conditions, you could be watching from your own cozy bar pub. No lines for the restrooms and no six dollar beers. For the price of taking the family to one game, you could get started building your bar. This site specializes in bar furniture construction and will give you plenty of great design ideas, all for a mere 20 bucks. Right now is the 2007 season opener special, so Join Now before the price goes up! 

Well, it’s now about a week later and into the first week of September. The August flies have started to decline, but there are still a few stragglers. There are still weekend footbal parties that can be help outdoors, so let’s investigate fly control further.
We tested a few other fly erradication methods are here are the results:
1. The hanging CD: It seemed to work in reducing flies, but on warm early evenings, they were still pretty bad, but it helps.
2. Hanging bags of water above the door: This worked about the same as the CD method. Warm air and the smell of food from the inside of the house will certainly attract plenty of flies to a screen door. The solution? Close the door sliding glass or main door.
3. Fly traps: They always work great, but place them in a sunny area AWAY from your party.
4. Mothballs: These also helped. Just dump them into a coffee can and place around your party area. Downside? The smell. Don’t use the “old fashioned” variety.
5. Flay paper or strips: Again, these always work, but must be hung in wind free areas. If it gets too windy, the strips wind up sticking to the side of your house or worse, someones head! Add a smaill lead weight at the bottom to keep them hanging straight.

The bottom line is to be proactive. Don’t leave trash lying around and place garbage cans away from the party area, preferably near the fly traps. Get your fly traps in place a few weeks or even months in advance. Reducing the local population early can help in the long run.

There’s nothing like summertime, but in the upper midwest and elsewhere in the country, August is the month of the fly. An enjoyable Labor Day Cookout can turn into a nightmare of flies hovering around grill areas, food on picinic tables and doorways leading into homes. In the late afternoon and early evenings we have seen literally thousands of flies on the side of our house, waiting for a hot dog to wander by. When it cools down at night, they wait eagerly by the screen door for someone to enter or exit at which time dozens buzz into the warm house to pick over kitchen leftovers and be yet another summer health hazard. Bug sprays and fly swatters can never get rid of all the flies and for someone with flyphobia (actaullly it’s called entomophobia) it can be maddening to try. However, there is hope. Rather than using chemicals and aggression to get rid of flies, I found a few tricks that mess with their little fly brains, and they seem to work.

The CD trick: This one really seems to work. Find an old CD-ROM disk that has the rainbow pattern on BOTH sides. CD’s that have printing on one side are not as effective. Drill a small hole (1/8″) about 1/2″ to 3/4″ from the edge of the disk. Be sure to wear safety glasses when drilling because they can shatter. Then, get about 2 feet of monofilament fishing line and place it through the hole and tie the two ends together. Hang this fly ornament right outside your door and for some reason it “seems to” keep the flies away. The theory is that the rainbow pattern mimics a fly eye and the movement confuses the flies brain into thinkng it’s a BIG fly, and little flies prefer to avoid big flies or predatory insects, like mud daubers, which eat flies for breakfast. If nothing else, the sun shining on the disc will keep them flying and make your dog bark. The effectiveness also varies from morning to evening with morning working better. Combine this with other hair brained methods for better effectiveness.

In Part II we will examine some other wacky methods for controlling those irritating flies.