South Tampa Termite Treatment: Kill Them Without Leaving Home

The oldest house in the Hyde Park historic district went up in 1885 on Newport Street. The district's period of significance runs 1886 to 1933 and it holds over nine hundred contributing buildings. That is a great deal of very old wood in one part of town.

Call 727-462-0400

The inspection is free. Austin has run our termite work since 2013, and he's the one who 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.

Tampa's oldest neighborhoods are its most exposed

O. H. Platt bought the Robert Jackson farm in 1886 and subdivided it, and Hyde Park became Tampa's first western suburb. Bayshore Boulevard started as a two lane brick road in 1914. Palma Ceia filled in south of it with street names lifted from old Havana and wasn't annexed by the city until 1953.

Drywood termites live inside the wood itself, not in the ground. A frame house from the twenties with real lumber in the walls and attic is simply more house to eat than block construction poured in 2005. On a street where most of the stock predates the war, that adds up.

Why I don't lead with a tent

People who have restored a Hyde Park or Palma Ceia house tend to have strong feelings about tarps going over the roof and what happens to the landscaping underneath.

Fumigation works and I will tell you when it is the right call. What it does not do is leave anything behind. The gas goes when the tarps go, and the wood is exactly as available to the next swarm as it was the week before. We have treated whole houses without a tent since 2003. Borate soaks into the wood and stays there, nothing is known to take it back out, and the house keeps working against them after we drive off.

You also stay in it. No food bagged, no pets boarded, nobody dragging two hundred pounds of tarp across a roof you just paid to redo.

Whole house, not the hot spot

Ask anyone you are considering whether they treat the entire structure or only the spot where you found pellets. Most treat the spot. It is less product and less time, which is why the number is lower, and it is a different job than the one we do. Every other piece of untreated wood in the house is still untreated wood.

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.