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I mentioned previously that we have dry wood termites, and that the estimate for treatment was to the tune of $2000 — plus a whole lot of inconvenience. (Removing all perishables, staying in a hotel with our pets while the tenting went on, etc.)

Now the thought of little insects eating away at our house was pretty unpleasant. It’s enough to make a person panic and want to get it taken care right away. There wasn’t even any discussion about whether or not we would get it treated — of course we would! We don’t want our house ending up in the belly of some bugs.

But that didn’t mean we signed up with the first person to come out. We got a couple of quotes in writing from our usual exterminating company for each of the treatment options, and the next day I called a couple of other companies. (One of which has yet to even call us back, what’s up with that?)

But one of them did return my call and inspected our house. It took the guy about 2 hours — he did all the same things the first people did and more. He even spent some time up in our boiling hot attic in the afternoon. He also took samples with him of the “peppercorns” to look at them in the lab. He believed that we had dry wood termites in the one location, but he found no evidence of them in the other locations. He recommended checking those locations again in a week, in case the first inspection had simply already shaken out the evidence.

Well, the next day he called us back and said that he and his manager had looked at the samples in the lab. The verdict?

We don’t have dry wood termites. We have crickets. Definitely crickets. I never thought I’d be grateful to hear that there are crickets in our house, but I am.

Crickets do nowhere near the amount of damage to wood — they prefer to eat other things — and they are soooo much cheaper to eliminate. He recommended treating them with the pest control supplies we can buy and apply ourselves. He also recommended still checking the other areas again in a week or two, and said he’d be happy to come take and inspect more samples if there were any.

All for free. We need to get that guy a thank-you-for-saving-us-$2,000 gift certificate or something.

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