New Homeowner Pest Control: What Your First Year in the House Actually Looks Like

You bought a house. Somewhere in the stack of paperwork was an inspection report, and it told you about the roof, the furnace, the electrical panel and the grading. It almost certainly told you nothing useful about what lives in the crawlspace, what nests in the eaves, or what the previous owner had been quietly dealing with every August.

Pests were simply not part of the inspector’s job. New homeowner pest control depends more on timing than on products, and your first twelve months are when that timing works most in your favor.

A general home inspection is a structural and systems review. The inspector is looking at whether things work and whether they are safe. The report notes pests when the evidence is obvious and in the way, such as a visible mud tube or an active wasp nest over the front door. Nobody crawled the perimeter looking for entry points, though, and nobody was there in the season when the problem shows itself.

So new homeowner pest control starts with knowing what nobody checked. Three things in particular tend to be invisible at closing:

• Entry points. Gaps where pipes and wires pass through the wall, unsealed thresholds, torn window screens, a missing dryer vent flap, and the gap under a garage door that has settled.
• History. Whether the last owner had a recurring ant trail every June, or a mouse in the pantry every October, and simply learned to live with it.
• Season. A house toured in April tells you nothing about its August yellow jackets.

This is the part most people have never been told, and it is the single most useful idea in new homeowner pest control.

Houses in the middle of a sale are quiet. Showings are brief, the owners may have already moved out, the landscaping gets watered on a timer or not at all, and nobody is opening the garage every day. A vacant or lightly occupied house is warm, undisturbed and unlit, which is close to ideal for the things that want to move in.

The vacancy window is usually a few weeks to a few months. That is long enough for a mouse to establish a run or for a wasp colony to settle into a soffit. Spiders move in too, because nobody is walking through their webs.

You are not inheriting a problem the previous owner hid from you. You are more likely inheriting one that started while the house was empty and nobody was there to notice.

Walk the outside of the house once, slowly, with a phone in your hand for photos. This costs an hour and it is the cheapest new homeowner pest control you will ever do.

• Walk the full foundation line. Look for gaps, cracks, and any place a pencil would fit. Mice need less room than people expect.
• Check where utilities enter the wall. Pipes, cable, gas line, the air conditioning line set. These are the most common unsealed entries on any house.
• Look up at the eaves, soffits and the porch ceiling. Wasp and hornet nests are easiest to spot before you are standing under one.
• Open the crawlspace or basement access. You are looking for droppings, chew marks on stored material, and daylight anywhere it should not be.
• Check every window screen and door sweep. A torn screen and a garage door with a gap at one corner are the two most common open doors on a house.
• Empty everything holding water. Saucers, buckets, tarps, wheelbarrows, the corrugated downspout extension, a neglected water feature. Standing water becomes mosquitoes in about a week.
• Cut vegetation back off the house. Shrubs touching siding are a bridge. Aim for a hand’s width of air between the plant and the wall.
• Look at the previous owner’s leftovers. A half-used bait station under the sink or a can of wasp spray in the garage tells you where they had a problem.

Take the photos. In six months, when something turns up, you will want to know what that corner looked like the week you moved in.

Most of new homeowner pest control is seasonal, and Colorado’s seasons are distinct enough that you can predict most of the year. Colorado State University Extension publishes guidance on the insects and rodents common in the state at extension.colostate.edu if you want to read further on any of these.

Spring. Ants come in looking for moisture, and this is when most people meet their kitchen for the first time. Wasp queens are scouting nest sites, so a nest removed in May is a five minute job and the same nest in August is not.

Summer. Spiders arrive because the insects they eat arrived. Yellow jackets reach their largest and most aggressive point late in the season rather than early. Mosquitoes build up cumulatively all summer, which is why late August and September carry Colorado’s concentrated West Nile risk rather than June. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment covers that at cdphe.colorado.gov.

Fall. The single most predictable event of your first year. The first hard cold snap sends mice and voles looking for somewhere warm, and your house is the warmest thing on the block. Everything you sealed in week one pays for itself here.

Winter. Quiet outside, and the season when anything already indoors becomes obvious because nothing else is competing for your attention. It is also the right time for the boring work: attic and crawlspace checks, and sealing what you found in the fall.

So the first year comes down to one pass in spring, attention in late summer, and sealing before the first freeze.

Some new homeowner pest control needs a company, and some of it you can do yourself.

Do it yourself, and it works: Empty standing water weekly, cut vegetation back off the siding, and seal gaps with the right material. Fix screens and door sweeps, and keep food and pet food in sealed containers. These are the highest-value actions on the list and they cost close to nothing.

Worth paying for: anything involving a ladder and a stinging insect. Anything inside a wall, a crawlspace or an attic where you cannot see what you are treating. A rodent problem that is already established, because trapping without finding the entry point is a permanent subscription to trapping. And a recurring problem you have already tried to solve twice.

Professional help makes sense in four situations. Three are about the problem: it is already inside the structure, it involves stinging insects at height, or it has come back after you addressed it. The fourth is about you, when you want a trained set of eyes on a house you have owned for three weeks and do not know yet.

Guardian Pest Management is family owned. Sean and Michelle Meade have run it since 2000, and they brought more than thirty years of pest control experience into it before that. We serve Highlands Ranch, Littleton, Castle Rock, Parker, Centennial, Lone Tree, Castle Pines, Greenwood Village, Roxborough and Cherry Hills.

On a new homeowner call, the first thing we do is walk the outside with you. If we find something you can fix yourself in an afternoon, we will say so before we quote anything. A sealed gap does more for you than a treated symptom.

We use EPA-registered products applied according to label instructions. Home service does not require a long-term contract, so a first visit is a first visit and nothing more. Commercial accounts work differently and are arranged directly with our office.

Related reading: what a summer barrier treatment does, what starts moving in spring and when, whether quarterly pest control is actually necessary, and identifying and stopping ants.

To have your new place looked at before the first cold snap, call Guardian Pest Management at (303) 346-7087, or start at myguardianpest.com.