This week on the Thoughts from the Crawlspace podcast, Jamie Miller, CEO of Gold Key Home Inspections, Inc., shares expert strategies for keeping pests at bay as spring brings a surge in activity. From sealing entry points to maintaining a clean yard and proper food storage, Jamie highlights essential steps to safeguard your home.

Listen as Jamie discusses his dedication to the community and how Gold Key Home Inspections is committed to helping homeowners and real estate professionals protect their properties with confidence.

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Episode Highlights

• Regular inspections and maintenance are vital in preserving the integrity of your home against pests.
• Proper food storage and cleanliness will significantly deter potential pest infestations in residential spaces.
• It is imperative to seal all entry points to prevent pests from infiltrating your home.
• Maintaining a tidy yard and addressing moisture issues are essential strategies for pest prevention. 

Timestamps

00:00 - Intro

04:17 - Pest Prevention Strategies

10:10 - Preventative Maintenance for Pest Control

13:20 - Pest Control Strategies

Welcome to Thoughts from the Crawl Space, a podcast where our goal as home inspection experts is to support and serve our community.

Whether you're a homeowner, home buyer, real estate agent or investor, we believe everyone deserves solutions to their homeownership challenges and inspiration along the way. Your path to success starts here. Welcome to spring. Great time to be alive. Hope springs eternal.

It's 70 degrees one day, 40 degrees the next, but hey, it's northern Indiana. What do you expect? Well, another thing that loves spring is pests. I guess things. Things that love spring are pests.

So our focus today is on how do you keep these pests from taking over your house? Right. You're the master of your house, not them. So.

So we want to give a few tips today on not spring cleaning per se, but some things you can do from top to bottom on your house that will help to keep the pests out. So let's start. Number one is rather obvious. Seal all the entry points.

So entry points for pests, depending on what kind of pests, can be extremely small and hard to find. Inspect for any gaps and cracks, cracks around windows, doors, pipes and the foundation.

So if you have maybe a refrigerant line come out off your air conditioner going into the house and maybe the caulk around it has cracked, or you've never had any caulk around it, you want to touch that up and seal it in some way so you don't get any pests in there. It could be just bugs, could be mice. Mice don't need much space to get in, as you probably found out already in your house.

Another thing to check is weather stripping around doors, especially if it gets cracked. Gap.

Sometimes the very bottom of it will break off because that seems to get the most of use as doors going in and out all the time, especially around your garage door, you can get weather stripping on the bottom of it. That will be. You'll have a big gap on one end of it. So you want to make sure you fix that.

That's a really big area for pests to come in is under a overhead garage door and then screen repair, just those, those screens. Maybe you take them out each winter and put them back in each spring, or you leave them year round.

Whatever you do, look for gaps in them, tears, anything like that, it's going to keep out flies, mosquitoes, bees, and all those winged insects at the very least. Number two, keep your yard tidy.

Now, this might seem rather obvious, but bushes and trees that are near the house really harbor insects and create A safe place for them. Carpenter ants frequently make their nests at the base of trees.

And if they overhang your house, they're going to be walking right up the branches and off the leaves on the roof. And then they can sneak in any gap or crack anywhere. So you want to make sure that you keep your trim.

Keep your trees trimmed and trim back those bushes as well. Also, clean up any leaves and debris. Just like trees and bushes. Leaves and debris provides shelter for pests like termites, ants and rodents.

So make sure to get any of that lawn cleanup done and get it out of there and proper drainage. Ensure your gutters in your downspouts are draining properly, all right. You don't want it to go toward the house.

Obviously, you want to go away from the house. Number three, store firewood and mulch properly.

We often call out this on home inspections, and that is when you have firewood stored against the house. Firewood harbors pests. Could be termites. In extreme situations, ants could be chipmunks hiding in that wood pile, mice, whatever.

Get that away from the house so that you can discourage pests from hanging out there. Also, mulch. If you use mulch on your house, that's okay. Don't make it real thick. Don't mound it up over the base of the siding. Use a thin layer.

Keep it away from the siding. Keep it below the siding as much as 6 inches if you can, and that'll help to keep critters away from your house. Number four, Maintain your roof.

You might not think of this when you think about pests, but on your roof you can get gaps or holes. You can get flashing that comes loose. Besides just moisture entry, this is an avenue for pests.

Frequently when we're inspecting an attic and we're looking out and it's dark in the attic, we can see daylight at various areas around the eaves or roof penetrations. And those are all potential avenues for pests. Think of pests this way. Their ultimate goal is, just like humans is, we're trying to survive.

And so a pest is going to look for any area he can to try and get into a house. Get in where it's warmer, get in where there's comfort, right? Insulation and so forth in an attic.

So look for any gaps, holes that have developed over the winter, etc. That could allow pests to come in and then clean your gutters.

You want them free of debris so you don't have water buildup, which can attract pests like mosquitoes and cause damage to the roof and foundation.

If you have a gutter that may be a slope the wrong way and you have water just pools in it all the time, that's a great breeding ground for mosquitoes and things like that. So, number five, inspect for signs of pest activity. So this, rather than just prevention, is also inspecting for the actual pests. And this could be.

Look for nests, look for webs. You know, if you have that big nest that somebody made in a tree last year, you know, bees, hornets, they can make.

They can make some beautiful nests. But if they've left, which they do, they go dormant in the winter. Get that nest out of there. They're not tempted to reuse that thing next spring.

Now, most of them will build a new one, but that's a lot harder than just reoccupying an old one. So get rid of old, old nests. Check for droppings. This is more related to rodents.

But any kind of droppings in an area can be a tip that you have some pests of some sort go into your attic.

And depending on how it's laid out and what concentration of droppings you see, it could be mice, it could be bats, it could be squirrels, could be chipmunks. Worst case could be raccoons. And so all those things can create an unhealthy environment in your house and in your attic.

So go check that out or call somebody that to come have that checked out. All right, number six out of ten, address moisture problems. We touched on this a little bit with the roof, but fix any leaks.

Pests like ants, termites, and roaches are attracted to moisture. So fix any leaks around windows, around doors on the roof, anything that might allow just a little bit of moisture.

Just a little bit is enough to attract them. Leaky pipes, faucets, anything like that, that's going to attract critters. Get that fixed up right away and use a dehumidifier.

And this is to lower the overall moisture level. As we mentioned, pests are attracted to moisture.

And so any basement or even an unvented crawl space is going to get damp in the spring, or a vented crawl space will too. But you don't want to use a dehumidifier in a vented crawl space. Excuse me.

Because then you're just recycling air, but you want to lower that moisture level overall in there. That'll also help keep mold down and just keep general junk from. From accumulating down in there.

Number seven, this is one I had not thought about in researching this topic was proper food storage. Think about that pantry where you have food stored, all the containers that you have it in. Seal the food containers, make sure the lids are airtight.

So cockroaches, mice, pests, things like that can't get in there and clean up crumbs. Don't leave food out. That is just a call for pests to come in when you leave food out in the kitchen. So having a clean house is a deterrent to pests.

So keep your house clean, keep crumbs cleaned up, keep the kitchen counters clean, don't leave food out overnight and call in the pests.

Number eight, trap and bait stations, if you know you have them, if you've sealed the exterior, if you've found the entry points and tried to keep them out, then, well, let's use some traps and baits. All right, this can help. This is kind of preventative maintenance. Keep it from getting really big. Look in your attic. Put some of these in your attic.

Could be glue traps, it could be the regular spring traps.

What you're trying to do is discourage full scale infestation because once it gets to that point, then almost your only recourse is to take out all of the insulation, get everything cleaned and re insulate. And that's expensive. So get up in your attic or hire somebody to get up in your attic. See what you have put in bait stations.

Put them around the exterior of your house, put them in the garage, put them in areas where you're likely to see that.

Now if you have ants, they're typically in the kitchen area and they're coming in through some crack or gap in the foundation or around the window or some things we've talked about before. Put some bait stations down for ants. And this is a little bit different type of product.

If you have pets in the house, not pests, pets like dogs and so forth, make sure you do ones that are pet friendly. Don't put a poison out there for ants that a pet could get into that could harm them. Number nine, pest control inspections. Get them done regularly.

We can do that as home inspectors. You can call a pest control company that can come out and inspect, prescribe a treatment, things like that. But do that regularly. Maybe twice a year.

Just like you get your furnace tuned up a couple of times a year or at least once a year, have them come out there and check that out. Another thing to think about, and this is going to go back to number point number six. Forgot about this. This shot up in my mind.

But if you have vinyl siding, go outside. And if you have vinyl siding, you have the corners on the ends of the vinyl side in the corners of your house.

And that's where the vinyl siding goes into. Well, those vinyl corners are hollow, all right.

And that is an avenue for especially mice and some chipmunks to crawl all the way up and then into your attic. And so what we have found, there is a product out there, and there's various things you can do.

If you spray foam it, they're going to likely chew through it. You can put steel wool in the bottom of those. They will rust out eventually. But it does have some deterrents. You can try something else.

But there's a product out there called Critter Cap. I believe it's a trademark name. Started the K, I believe K R I, T T E R, K A P.

And these are shaped to snap in the bottom of those vinyl siding corners. And so look those up online, get some kind of deterrence, some screening, something to put on the bottom of those vinyl corners.

And that'll help keep pests from just using that as a super highway into your attic. And number 10, consider some natural repellents.

And some of these, like essential oils, peppermint, tea tree oil, and citronella, can help repel insects. I know citronella is supposed to repel mosquitoes and things like that.

How well they work is kind of a function of how well you use them, the level of your infestation or swarms or how big that is. And then another thing that you can use that is good for your garden, it can be good in a variety of areas, is called diatomaceous earth.

And diatomaceous earth is a natural substance that can be sprinkled around the foundation of your home to deter insects like ants, cockroaches, and fleas. So last year we discovered that we had just every day there was a colony of ants coming in.

Not the wood destruction kind, but just coming in after your food. And they crawl up the dishwasher, they'd be on the kitchen counter. So we traced them back down the floor, across the floor, under the baseboard.

And evidently there's a small hole between our garage wall and the baseboard in the house that they were getting in.

So we used diatomaceous earth, put it around the perimeter of our garage inside, and then we sprinkled some around the outside of the house as well to help try to control the ink ant entry points.

So lots of things you can do to pest proof your house if you have a concern about a serious infestation or you just want to know in general, we do home maintenance inspections. We'd love to come out and do that for 199.

For an hour of us inspecting in your house, I think that's a darn good investment to make sure your home hasn't slowly been taken over by pests.

Because what happens frequently is they come in little by little, or things happen little by little and you don't see them, and all of a sudden you have a much larger problem. So preventative maintenance is best for your health. It's also best for the health of your home. Give us a call if we can help you out in that.

Thanks for listening today and everybody have a great week. Thank you for listening. This week.

You can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. For more information about Gold Key Inspection services, go to goldkeyinspect.com.