Pest Control on Alabama Hill, Bellingham

A neighborhood that aged all at once

Alabama Hill went up in a concentrated period through the 1960s and 70s, on sloping ground east of the city, and that shared birthday is the single most useful fact about working here.

Houses built in one decade by similar builders using similar materials do not just look alike. They fail alike, and they fail at the same time. The components that define this housing stock — cedar and T1-11 siding, original foundation vent screens, decks, flashing, single-glazed windows since replaced, the first generation of continuous soffit venting — all have service lives, and on this hill they are running out together.

That is why we so often find the same three or four things at address after address, and it is why a problem at one house on a street is a reasonable prompt to check your own.

The cedar, and what fifty years does to it

Cedar was used generously here and it is the material that most defines our work on this hill.

It weathers beautifully. It also softens, and softening is what matters. Carpenter ants do not eat wood — they excavate galleries in it to nest — and what they want is timber that has begun to break down. Half a century of Pacific Northwest weather turns cedar trim, fascia, the bottom edge of siding, deck framing and fence posts into precisely that.

The thing homeowners get wrong is looking at the face of the siding. Cedar weathers from the exposed edges and the shaded, splashed and joint areas inward. A wall that looks perfectly respectable from the driveway frequently has punky fascia above it, a soft bottom course, and trim around a window that has been taking water at a failed flashing for a decade.

The structural point that decides whether a treatment holds: a mature carpenter ant population keeps its main nest outdoors and puts satellite nests inside the building. On these lots the main nest is usually findable — a stump left from the original clearing, a standing dead limb, an old landscape timber, a rotting fence post, the woodpile. The satellites are what people see indoors.

Treat the satellites and leave the main colony sitting twenty feet away in the garden, and you buy a quiet couple of months. That is the whole reason this work gets a reputation for coming back, and it is why the first visit here is investigative before it is anything else.

Frass tells you what you are dealing with. Carpenter ants push shavings out, so the debris below a gallery is fibrous and often has insect parts in it — quite different from the fine powder under a wood-boring beetle hole or the hard pellets a dampwood termite leaves behind.

Components at end of life

Beyond the cedar, this era left a specific inventory, and most of it is now on borrowed time.

Original foundation vent screens. Chosen for airflow rather than longevity, in light material, and now on their second half-century. Somewhere on nearly every house of this age one has corroded through at a corner and has been open for years. This is the most common single entry point on the hill and among the cheapest to correct properly.

Decks. Frequently original or first-replacement, with two separate consequences. The space beneath is dry, sheltered and undisturbed, which makes it excellent harborage. And the ledger where the deck attaches to the house is a chronic defect of this construction period — flashed badly or not at all, which produces sustained wet framing at exactly the point where a lot of weight is hanging.

Continuous soffit venting. One of the era’s better ideas, and a route once the screening degrades or a panel works loose. On a hillside house the soffit is often reachable from a branch or a bank that was not there in 1972.

Retrofit archaeology. Fifty years of improvements leave marks. Windows replaced, sometimes twice, each time with a gap at the trim that was filled with whatever was in the van. Insulation blown in decades after construction into cavities never designed for it. A wood stove installed and later removed, leaving a thimble. Cable, satellite and internet each drilling their own entry. Heat pumps added, with a line set through the wall.

None of that is bad work. It is simply accumulation, and it means a proper exclusion job on a house of this vintage finds a dozen or more small things rather than one obvious hole.

What the slope does

Alabama Hill is built into a grade and the terrain shapes the building envelope more than people expect.

A daylight basement or split level meets the earth at several elevations. The line where buried foundation becomes exposed foundation is where water and insects both find their way in, and it is rarely detailed as carefully as either condition would be alone.

A stepped or partly excavated crawlspace does not drain evenly. Groundwater travels downhill, arrives at the uphill wall, and collects at the low end of the crawl. That end stays damp for months after the rest has dried, and the joists and subfloor above it are what soften. Where we find moisture ants or decay in a house on this hill, that is nearly always where they are.

Access compounds it. The crawl hatch is commonly at the high, dry, convenient end, which means the interesting findings are at the far end from the door. A report written from the hatch on a hillside house is close to worthless, and it is the step most often skipped by whoever came before us.

Retaining walls and terracing hold moisture against structure and, where they are the original timber, become nesting sites in their own right.

Drainage ties it all together. A downspout discharging onto a bank that drains straight back at the foundation is a common finding here and an easy fix, and correcting it usually does more than any product would.

Landscaping that grew up

Everything on this hill was planted small in about 1970, and almost none of it is small now.

A shrub set two feet from the wall is now pressed against the siding. A tree planted for future shade now has branches on the roof. Foundation planting has matured into a continuous screen that holds moisture against the building and gives cover right up to the vents. Ground cover has crept over the grade line. Old landscape timber has softened into ideal nesting material.

None of that was a mistake. It is what happens when a garden succeeds for fifty years. But it means that on this hill the most valuable half-hour of a survey is frequently spent with pruners rather than with anything from the truck: pulling planting back off the walls, cutting the branch that bridges to the roof, and re-establishing a dry band at the base of the siding.

Where homeowners do that work, treatments hold. Where they do not, we are back, and we would rather say so than take the repeat booking quietly.

The wooded edge

Parts of the hill back onto trees, and where they do the pressure is different in degree rather than in kind.

Wooded ground supplies continuous cover right up to a building, so an animal never has to cross open ground to reach it. Deer mice come off the margins along with rats and house mice, finding vents, the gap under a deck, a service entry or a soffit. Spider and centipede numbers are higher, because damp wooded ground produces insects in quantity and everything that eats insects follows.

Where droppings need clearing in an enclosed space, ventilate it first and avoid sweeping or vacuuming dry material — a sensible precaution regardless of what the risk turns out to be in a given building, and free to observe. Washington’s Department of Health says the same about handling rodent droppings, and the page is worth two minutes before anybody opens a crawl hatch that has been shut all winter.

The treeline is permanent and it is a large part of why people live here. Nothing applied to a property changes it. What changes the outcome is the envelope, which is finite work: vents screened in material that will outlast the next fifty winters, the deck gap closed, branches cut back, and grade corrected.

Rodents and the autumn

The seasonal logic here is the Bellingham one, sharpened by the hillside and the housing age.

Rats and mice live outdoors comfortably through the summer — blackberry, undergrowth, the wooded margins, decking with a gap beneath, woodpiles and compost. Then the rain sets in through late September and October, the ground saturates, burrows flood, and everything needs somewhere dry within a few weeks.

Brambles, woodpiles and compost are a yard question before they are a house question, and WSU’s Hortsense factsheets are written for exactly that side of it — home gardens and landscapes.

A fifty-year-old house on a slope with an open vent screen and a stepped crawlspace is a good answer to that problem.

The prevention window is August: dry ground, dry crawlspaces, easy access to the exterior, and the movement still weeks off. A house sealed then simply does not have the winter problem. A house sealed in December has an interior problem plus whatever is now shut inside with it, and the order of operations gets considerably more awkward.

Insulation, and what a winter costs

On a hill with this much rodent pressure it is worth being specific about what happens inside a building over a season.

Rodents do not merely cross insulation, they tunnel and nest in it, and they are incontinent as they travel. A single run becomes a contaminated channel rather than a soiled patch, and compressed, fouled material has lost most of the value somebody is paying to heat against.

In an attic that shows up as ceiling staining, a smell that is hard to place, and a heating bill that has quietly climbed. In a crawlspace it shows up as batts hanging loose, because they took on moisture and lost their grip — and that loose material is then both nesting habitat and a moisture problem of its own.

Where remediation is needed the order is not negotiable: exclude first, remove and replace second. New material installed into a building that is still open is paying twice, and we will say so rather than quoting the part that is easier to sell.

The renovation moment

A great many houses on this hill are being updated, and renovation is the best and worst time for this work.

Best, because an open wall is the only occasion anybody sees what fifty years did to the framing: old galleries, moisture damage around a window that failed in 1994, a run of soft sill, a nest in a cavity nobody could otherwise reach. Correcting any of it is never cheaper than while the finish is already off, and sealing penetrations during a remodel is trivial where it is awkward forever afterwards.

Worst, because a building under renovation is wide open — doors propped, sections of wall off, materials stacked outside, and frequently nobody there overnight. We regularly see houses acquire problems during a remodel that they did not have before it began, especially across an autumn.

The useful sequence, if work is planned: have somebody look before the walls close, make envelope sealing part of the project rather than an afterthought, and deal with the crawlspace while access is easy.

Old damage deserves a specific note. Galleries in a joist and old exit holes are history rather than a current problem, and damage persists for decades after the insects have gone. We would far rather establish which you are looking at than treat something that finished in 1988.

Wasps on a hillside

Banked ground, terracing and retaining structures give yellowjackets the cavities they want, and a ground nest beside a set of steps or a path is invisible until somebody disturbs it. On a property where people are walking narrow paths between levels that is a genuine hazard, and the colony peaks in late summer when everybody is outdoors.

Bald-faced hornets build the gray paper nests people photograph, often in a tree and frequently unnoticed on a wooded lot until the leaves come down. Paper wasps take eaves, deck rails and the corners of sheds and are the mildest of the three — where they are somewhere nobody goes, we will often suggest leaving them.

The cheap intervention is a spring walk of the eaves, decks and ground edges, when a founding nest is the size of a golf ball. The same nest in August is a different conversation entirely.

Spiders, and the September phone call

Giant house spiders bring the autumn calls. They are harmless, they have been established across western Washington for generations, and the big fast ones found indoors are wandering males looking for mates rather than anything coming in for warmth. A spider stranded in a bath is a male that got in and could not climb out.

There is no established brown recluse population anywhere in Washington and none has been recorded in this county.

What actually reduces the numbers is exterior work: clearing webbing, dealing with harborage under decks and in crawl vents, moving firewood off the wall, correcting outside lighting that concentrates the insects they feed on, and sealing the door sweeps most of them use to get in.

What we will not sell you

A promise about the treeline. That population is permanent. We seal the building, which is the part that actually works.

Recurring service over an unresolved water problem. If the low end of your crawl is wet, drainage comes first, and a quarterly plan laid on top of it is an indefinite cost.

Treatment for old, inactive damage. Fifty-year-old galleries are evidence of history, not of a live infestation.

Anything with fur or feathers. Wildlife is outside our scope, and on a wooded hillside the question comes up often. We handle insects and rodents, and will hand you a better number for the rest.

How a visit works here

We start outside, and on this hill that walk takes a while. Every elevation where the building meets earth, the drainage and where it discharges, the condition of the cedar at its edges and joints, the deck and its ledger, the vent screens, the soffit line, the branches reaching the roof, the stumps and dead wood on the lot, the firewood, and the retaining structures.

Then underneath — properly, with a light, working to the low end of a stepped crawl rather than reporting from the hatch. Then the attic. Then inside.

You get a plain account of what we found and what is causing it, what needs doing now, what can wait, and which items are carpentry, drainage or tree work rather than a pest treatment. On a fifty-year-old hillside house a real share of the answer is not work we get paid for, and we say it anyway.

Looking is free for every pest we handle other than bed bug verification, which is charged and then taken off the treatment. Nothing here is tied to a term agreement.

Buying or selling on the hill

A short note, because the housing stock here turns over steadily and the same findings come up in transaction after transaction.

If you are buying, the items worth looking at yourself before anybody writes a report are the ones this page has already named: the bottom edge of the cedar and the fascia, the vent screens, the deck ledger, where the downspouts discharge, and whether the crawl access is at the high end of a slope. None of that needs training. All of it predicts what a professional evaluation is going to say.

If you are selling, the same list is worth attending to early rather than negotiating over late. Vent screens and a downspout are inexpensive. A soft fascia board and a badly flashed ledger are carpentry rather than pest work, and they read very differently on a report when they have already been corrected.

We are not structural pest inspectors and we do not issue the wood-destroying organism report a lender relies on — that is a separate credential and it should come from an independent inspector. What we do is treat what such a report identifies, and on this hill that is most often carpenter ants in softened cedar with the colony sitting out in the garden.