What Happens When You Call, and What to Have Ready

Four questions that place the job

Nobody expects an identification over the phone. What matters is the difference between one insect at a door frame and a dozen in a kitchen at midnight, because those are two different jobs with two different visits attached to them.

People are often surprised to be asked about the foundation before anything else. On a slab the ways in are the bath trap, the plumbing penetrations, the construction joint and the gap where the slab has pulled back from the foundation wall. Over a crawl space the work happens underneath the floor, with a hatch, a light and a technician on their elbows. Knowing which one is coming means the right equipment arrives and somebody gets under the house on the first visit rather than the second.

A photograph helps more than a description ever will. Take it with something for scale beside it, a coin or a pen, and keep the specimen if you have one, in a taped container or a sealed bag. Half the calls this market gets about one insect turn out to be about a different one.

• What you are seeing, in your own words: insects, droppings, damage, noise or a smell
• Where in the property, and how many rooms or how much of the yard
• How long it has been going on, from this morning to since last summer
• Slab or crawl space, because the method changes completely on that answer

What a free inspection includes, and what you leave with

Free means free, and it is worth being specific about what that covers: the interior areas relevant to what you reported, the perimeter of the house, the crawl space where there is one and it can be reached, the attic where it can be entered, and the yard when the problem is outside.

What you leave with is the part that matters. An identification of what you have, where it is getting in or breeding, what is feeding it, a written scope of the recommended work with a price on it, and a straight answer on whether this needs ongoing service or a single visit.

Two things are separate jobs and any company pretending otherwise is charging you somewhere else. A wood-destroying insect report for a sale is licensed work on a specific form, seen locally from about $75 and usually an estimated $70 to $120 on a normal house. A canine bed bug inspection, where one is offered, is also quoted on its own.

Emergency, same day, or later this week

Three tiers, and the cheapest one is the right answer far more often than the industry admits. Emergency means dispatched now at an after-hours rate, and it is the correct call for something unsafe or actively spreading: a wasp nest at a door somebody has to use, yellow jackets in a wall beside a child's bedroom, a bat in a living room, a raccoon through a ceiling, or a rodent chewing wiring you can hear.

Same day is a booked slot before the end of today at the standard rate. It fits a situation that is not dangerous and is not livable either, which is what most people actually mean when they say emergency.

A planned visit later in the week is identical work for the lowest figure. Fire ant mounds in a lawn, a mosquito treatment before a weekend, an annual termite inspection, a quarterly service, a report for a sale: none of those get better by being done tonight. If it can safely wait until morning, that is the same job for less money, and you should be told so rather than sold the premium slot.

Access, and the one instruction people get backwards

An inspection is only as good as the parts of the house somebody can reach, so half an hour of clearing beforehand is worth more than anything else you can do. An area recorded as inaccessible is an area nobody treated.

• Crawl space hatch left unlocked, with a working bulb below
• Sink cabinets in the kitchen and both bathrooms opened up
• Boxes off the garage floor along the wall shared with the house
• Firewood, mulch and stacked lumber moved back from the brick
• Gate key or code sorted before the arrival window
• Dog secured, and say so at booking if one gets under the house
• Previous reports and agreements out on the counter

Do not strip the beds before a bed bug inspection

This is the instruction people get backwards, and they get it backwards because stripping the bed feels like the helpful thing to do.

An inspection reads the evidence where it sits: the seams and piping of the mattress, the label and the underside of the box spring, the head of the frame, and the sheets themselves, where small dark spots and rust colored smears tell most of the story. Wash all of that the night before and you have laundered the report.

So leave the bed made and the linens where they are. Do not move furniture between rooms, do not bag clothing and shift it to another bedroom, and do not spray a store bought product. Moving things spreads the problem into rooms that did not have it, and a hardware store aerosol scatters a population into wall voids where the real treatment then has to chase it. Vacuum the floor if you want to, and stop there.