Al Heavens is a Haddonfield, N.J.- based, nationally syndicated, home-improvement writer and author whose newspaper columns, magazine articles and books have been the first word on remodeling for 50 million readers for more than three decades. He is the author of What No One Ever Tells You About Renovating Your Home and Remodeling on The Money: Fifteen Innovative Projects Designed to Add Value to Your Home and was “The Gadgeteer” on Discovery Channel’s Home Matters program.
It was a while back, and the details are a bit fuzzy, but the remodeling project on our first house included upgrading a powder room in an L-shaped addition off the kitchen.
On the other side of the back wall of the bathroom was a dilapidated shed dating perhaps from the 1930s or 1940s. To save money, I razed the shed myself, and found evidence of termite damage. We called a pest-control company that confirmed my observations about the shed damage and found that the termites also had worked their way into the back wall of the bathroom.
Before any work could begin, the termites had to be eradicated and the damage they had caused removed. Treatment and cleanup reduced the amount of money we, as young, first-time homeowners, had been planning to spend on actual improvements.
And that is the moral of this story: Whenever a house is involved, nothing is ever easy. Prevention, or if that fails, early detection and correction, are the best courses of action when it comes to home infestation of different species.
Unfortunately, the accepted treatment of termites at the time involved the use of chlordane, which was banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1987 after being used on 30 million homes in the United States since it was introduced commercially in 1947.
While chlordane was a longer-lasting solution – 30 years — than the new termiticides, the EPA maintained that prolonged exposure to it resulted in headaches, blurred vision, dizziness, involuntary muscle movements, tremors, and seizures.
Sometimes the cure can be as bad or worse than the disease.
The one long-lasting effect of that encounter with termites nearly 40 years ago is what in the trade is called the “tap test.”
Periodically, I walk through the basement tapping the floor joists with a hammer. If I hear a thudding sound, I am 95 percent certain that there is no termite damage. If the sound is hollow, then it is 95 percent likely that termites already have infested and eaten away at the interior of the joists.
Knock on wood, literally and figuratively, thudding has been the response for as long as I have been checking. Still, never assume that all is well, even if things thud rather than echo.
On occasion, usually in the autumn, I will find a dead wasp in our master bedroom. The discovery sends me outside to look up at the corners of the eaves, near windows or anywhere along the roof line to check where the wasps have built a nest and may have found a way to get inside.
Most people worry about being stung, but they also need to be concerned about the kind of damage wasps can cause by digging through drywalled ceilings and walls trying to get in or out. The autumnal wasp might have been one on the lookout for a place to build a nest during the winter.
The wasps – nests and all – need to go as soon as you find evidence of their existence. Other pests – including spiders – will use the abandoned wasp tunnels to gain access to your house.
When you have removed the outside nest, make sure the wood behind it is not damaged, since those papery nests are made of chewed wood that must come from somewhere.
Before you repair the damage, make sure that the wasps have not built any nests inside. Although I have no problem with spraying the outdoor nests from a distance and removing all traces of them, I would prefer to call an exterminator for interior infestations.
I was watching a renovation program recently in which the contractor discovered damage by powderpost beetles, which, while not as bad as termites, can really do a number on wood and, as such, can add to the cost of a project.
Powderpost beetles tend to go after wood that has not been painted or sealed, such as the floor joists in older houses.
It reminded me of something that happened about 40 years ago, when I was a member of a church that was built in the 1750s but had a brick tower dating from 1843.
The person in charge of property maintenance hired a pest removal company to conduct a routine inspection. In the tower, the inspector found evidence of powderpost beetles, but no obvious damage, on one of the huge wooden beams that supported the eight huge bells that were rung every Sunday morning.
Bellringing was prohibited, and the estimate for treatment and replacement of the beam amounted to thousands of dollars.
My journalistic curiosity being aroused, I contacted the experts at Independence Historical Park to see if they would double-check the findings. The experts said that while there was evidence of powerpost beetles on the support beams, they had been dead for more than a century.
The beams were as sound as the bells, which began ringing again and have done so every Sunday before and since.
I recently replaced a 10-year-old raised bed of cedar boards that looked kind of ratty. When I disassembled the raised bed, I found the evidence of woodworm, a beetle that bores holes in the surface of the wood to lay their eggs. The larvae then feed until just a thin layer of the wood remains.
They tend to be an outdoor problem, but I remember my father, who ran a furniture-refinishing business on the side, having to amputate one leg of a large antique table that had been hollowed out by woodworms. He did such a fine job matching the new leg to the other three that the ecstatic customer paid him twice what my father had asked.
Other buggy critters can besiege your house and cause damage. For example, moths than can chew holes in clothing; carpet beetles that feed on rugs and upholstery; camel crickets that chew cardboard boxes in basements (my wife thinks they’re lucky and won’t let me do them in); carpenter bees and honeybees, which do damage wood, but you should not kill because as pollinators, they do 100 times more good than damage; carpenter ants, which you should do in without thinking about it; cockroaches, which eat wallpaper and carry diseases; and silverfish, which eat paper and old books.
Last, but not least by any stretch of the imagination, we turn to rodents: mice, rats, and Public Enemy No. 1, squirrels.
Typically, mice are someone else’s problem that become yours. In our first house, they entered through the back wall of the kitchen in late autumn as the sun headed lower in the sky and the nearby alley in which they resided from mid-spring got cold and dark.
The problem was solved when post-termite reconstruction of that wall sealed even the dime-sized holes that those shape-shifters can access.
The basement where my aunt and uncle stored groceries was right below the tub in the first-floor bathroom where I took my bath. One night, when I was six, I was sitting in the tub when a rat scurried up the wall in front of me, less than a foot from my face.
Of the thousands of reader letters and email I have received over the last 50 years, about 75 percent have been about squirrel infestation. They damage wallboard and wood, chew through electrical and telephone wires, eat insulation, grind their teeth on fences, soffits, and furniture, keep you up at night by running between floor and ceiling joists, and defecate everywhere.
They are tough to get rid of. I have found that capsaicin, the organic chemical that makes hot peppers hot, will deter them (and me, too), as well as sealing access points with hardware cloth. Loud music drives them crazy, so it is a way to force them outside during the daytime so you can close the holes they have chewed to get inside.
I do not advocate killing squirrels, by the way, as much as I despise them, because it is both cruel and against the law in many states (New Jersey Title 23, Section 23: 4-9, for example, only permits it in the event the squirrels are destroying crops). Capturing them in a Havahart trap and relocating them in the wild is what I always have done, and I encourage you to do so as well.
Squirrels have a useful function, shaping forest ecology by planting seeds to eat later and then forgetting where they put them – in effect, farming – which is why you often have daffodils growing in the middle of the driveway.
In our next article, we will discuss how to decide on storage to fit your family’s lifestyle.