Termite treatment at my house

One day last fall, I noticed a small rotted area at the bottom of the brick molding around my insulated steel back door. When I probed the spots, I found the entire molding had been hollowed out by termites. I decided to replace the entire door with an insulated fiberglass (Peachtree) door. When I removed the door threshold, I found that the band joist and sill plate had been consumed by termites. The floor joists had started to settle as the sill plate collapsed from the termite damage. I jacked up the floor joists and installed a new pressure-treated sill plate. Then I installed the new fiberglass door and trim.

I needed to have my house treated for termites or they would just enter it somewhere else and continue the destruction. I did a lot of research into the various methods of treating for termite and I selected a liquid perimeter treatment using the Bayer Premise termiticide. The photo on the left shows the Premise powder that is mixed with water in a large tank inside their truck. The photo on the right shows the inside of the truck with the tank and the long hose used to inject the chemical into the ground. Premise is a non-repellant type of termite treatment so the termites will not know it is there. It will eventually kill the ones that go through it, but not before they transmit the chemical to other termites in the colony. These non-repellant treatments offer long-term continuous protection even if several small spots are missed during the treatment process. With the repellant types, the termites can find the missed spots and go through them avoiding contact with the chemicals.

The Premise was applied around the entire exterior of my home and around the inside of the basement and garage. This is in case the termite colony is located underneath the basement floor. The indoor process involved drilling one-half-inch holes through the basement and garage concrete floors and injecting the Premise chemicals into the soil under pressure with a long wand. The photo at the left is in my garage and the photo on the right is my mail handling room in my basement (notice the Update Bulletins on the walls.) This drilling does create some dust which must be swept up.

The area of my basement used for my recreation/game room has commercial-type carpeting glued to the floor. We had to lift up the carpeting along the wall and fold it back to drill the holes in the floor. See photo on the left. Once it was completed, the carpet was glued down again.

A small cork was pushed into the holes and then each one is filled with mortar mix. There were several hundred holes drilled total in the garage and the basement.

Outdoors, a small trench (only several inches wide and deep) was dug with a spade and the chemical injection wand was inserted into the ground. See photo on left of chemicals being injected into the ground. As the wand was removed, the trench was also filled with Premise. The entire job took about six hours for a crew of three installers. There was no odor from the chemicals.

I definitely recommend you have your house inspected for termites every year or two to avoid all the problems that I recently experienced with my home.