Full home inspection
Say Farewell to Those Persistent Ants
Moisture, pavement, odorous house, carpenter and thatching ants. A full home inspection finds the nest, because treating the trail buys you a fortnight.
Chapter 01
Five ants, five different jobs
Five kinds of ant turn up on a Kenmore property, and they are not one problem wearing five names. Moisture ants and carpenter ants are a moisture and wood story: both show up where dampness has already settled into a sill plate, a porch post or a stud bay, using rot the way a scout uses a map. Pavement ants and thatching ants work the exterior perimeter instead, the driveway seam, the walkway joint, the mulch bed pushed up against the foundation. Odorous house ants are the ones almost everyone actually meets, in a straight line across the kitchen counter to whatever spilled the night before.
None of the five gets treated the same way as another, because none of them is trying to get into the house for the same reason. A line on the counter and a line on the porch slab can both be ants and still point at completely different jobs.
A brick wall and window well close against a mulch bed, the kind of tight exterior line where moisture ants, pavement ants and thatching ants cross into a Kenmore home
The full home inspection is the point
AB Pest Control's own service page is titled Locating Ants With Full Home Inspections, and that is not office language. An ant trail on the worktop rarely starts on the worktop. It starts at a gap in a foundation vent, a gap behind a baseboard, a nest tucked into a wall void three rooms away, and the ants walking across the counter are only the visible tail end of that trail.
Treating the trail without finding where it actually starts buys a short reprieve and nothing more. The inspection is what turns a counter full of ants into a located nest, which is the only version of this job worth doing.
Chapter 03
Moisture ants and carpenter ants are telling you about the house
Moisture ants and carpenter ants do not choose a house at random. Both are drawn to wood that is already wet, and on the Eastside, in a climate that stays damp for most of the year, that usually means a leaking gutter, a sill plate that never quite dries out, or a crawlspace vent doing less than it should. Finding one of these two ants is as much information about the house as it is about the ants.
That is the difference thirty years makes. A newer crew sees ants and reaches for a spray. Recognising moisture ants or carpenter ants for what they are means recognising that the house itself has something worth looking at, not just the ants sitting on top of it.
Interior and exterior, then prevention
The site's own promise on this service is to eliminate ants and prevent further infestations, and that is a sequence, not a slogan. Interior treatment clears what has already made it inside, kitchen, pantry, wherever the trail actually ends. Exterior treatment works the same perimeter every one of the five ants above uses to get in: foundation line, porch slab, mulch bed, driveway seam.
Prevention is what the first two steps are actually for. An exterior perimeter that has been worked properly is the reason the next line of ants across the counter does not happen, rather than something dealt with after the fact each time.
AB Pest Control: Free phone estimates within 24 hours. Call (425) 205-1603.