Seminole Heights Termite Treatment: Tampa’s Oldest Bungalows
T. Roy Young filed the first plat on July 25, 1911 and Seminole Heights became Tampa's first suburb. It has more bungalows than any other neighborhood in the city. Bungalows are wood, and drywood termites live inside wood.
Call 727-462-0400The inspection is free. A certified operator comes out, looks at what you've actually got, and tells you straight. If it turns out you don't have termites, we'll tell you that too, and you're out nothing.
Built for the streetcar, built out of lumber
The trolley line running down to Sulphur Springs is what made the neighborhood possible. Houses here started at five thousand dollars and had to face east to west. Suwanee Heights went in next door in 1912 with lots starting at fourteen hundred. Hillsborough High School opened in 1928.
Two national historic districts sit inside Old Seminole Heights now, and the Seminole Heights Residential District's period of significance runs 1912 to 1928. That is housing stock a hundred years old and it is almost entirely frame construction.
Drywood termites do not come up from the ground. They live in the wood, which means a 1915 bungalow gives them considerably more to work with than anything built since.
What a tent actually costs you here
Fumigation works. On some houses it is the right call and I will say so plainly. But it kills what is there today and leaves nothing behind, so your wood is wide open to the next swarm season.
Since 2003 we have done whole house tentless treatments instead. The borate goes into the wood and stays, nothing is known to remove it, and the framing keeps defending itself long after we are gone. You never leave the house while we work.
On a block of restored bungalows with mature oaks over the street, that matters for reasons beyond convenience.
The question to ask
Whole house or hot spot. Most companies treat the spot where you found pellets and leave the rest of the framing untreated. That is a cheaper number for a smaller job, and on a bungalow with wood in every wall it leaves most of the house unprotected.
The guarantee
If the bugs come back, so do we. You see something during your warranty year, you call, and we come back out and retreat at no additional cost. Keep it current and you can carry that for life.
Here's the honest reason not to sit on it. A drywood colony takes about five years to get big enough to throw swarmers, the winged ones that leave and start new colonies somewhere else in your house. Once that starts, one colony becomes several, and several becomes dozens. Caught early it's a straightforward job. Caught late, I've seen it take years to track them all down. That's not a sales line. That's just how they work.
Call and we will come look. The look costs you nothing.
Call 727-462-0400As long as GOD keeps making them, we'll keep killing them. You have a great day.
