Attention Homeowners – Don’t Get Fooled by Your Pest Control Company!

The common idiom, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” is the perfect explanation of why a once-a-year pest control inspection and treatment is recommended to stay in control over home invasion by irritating to potentially dangerous and damaging pests, insects and rodents.  The diverse ways a home invasion can occur is sufficient to convince the homeowner that for the best protection of family, pets and structural integrity, simplified do-it-yourself remedies may manage to keep invasive pests in check, but there is little as irritating as taking an hour in a season to apply an over-the-counter remedy or some home-grown concoction found on the internet, only to find that “in check” is about as successful as a pied piper without a flute.  “You may have fooled me once,” the pest defiantly says with a wagging finger, “but I’m ba-a-a-ck, and I have an army this time!”

Home invasive pests are clever creatures, one and all, and they have multiple entry points into the home.  Or, if one is lucky, they remain outside, but they still infest the yard making any family activity on the patio as risky as an African safari where the food chain just reached stage five critical.  Is this why leisure time was invented?

Omitting the home exterior, which is, after all, a natural element to most pests and is, therefore, their territory and their rules if left uncontrolled, the typical home presents entry points beginning with the foundation wall, or even under it, where a little investigation after several years beyond original construction finds that it is not the impregnable barrier once thought.  Just the requirements of construction to bring plumbing, electrical, natural gas and water from the outside into the home punctures the foundation wall for each supply’s entry.  Sometimes, the seals breakdown, or were never adequate at the start, or are chewed through just to gain access to the inside.  Some pests require almost no apparent gap.  They find a way.

Even if the foundation is secure, it has wide gaps in it to allow human access: human doors and a garage door for the car; huge, gigantic access ways for small pests no larger than a grain of rice.  If light is seen passing through the gaps, even when these pest thoroughfares are closed, guess who’s coming for dinner?  The exterior walls also have multiple gaps in them just for viewing pleasure of the outside world while the homeowner is safe and secure inside.  Safe is relative; if the pest is a dog or a cat, maybe so, but the pest whose body is rice-size and flexible and can squeeze through even very small gaps.

Not all pests remain on the ground. Most have amazing wall-scaling skills that overcome gaps under eaves, through roofing material, the chimney and through more construction punctures for the various vents to exhaust fumes from… well, never mind.

An annual professional pest control inspection and treatment will fool them year after year.