Borate & Beam Pretreat Co. · Dunmore Flats & the grange roads · Builders’ pre-treatment since 2004
Termites scout your build before the roof is on. Meet them at the soil.
The pretreat is the only termite treatment in the life of a house that happens before there is a house to eat — termiticide to the graded soil under the slab, borate on the plates and studs during framing, a perimeter at final grade. Borate & Beam schedules around your pour, treats to the label, and hands your buyer a warranty letter that reads like it was written by somebody who meant it.
The soil treatment goes down after grading and before the vapour barrier — call us at footing inspection, not after the pour. Once the plastic is down, the honest window is closed: (555) 037-9154.
The slab pretreat
$0.42/ sq ft of slab
- Termiticide to graded soil, to the label, every square foot
- Applied between grading and the vapour barrier
- Joints, penetrations and thickened edges included
- Batch numbers and coverage map filed the same evening
Scheduled around the pour date, never after it.
The framing borate
$0.28/ sq ft of frame
- Borate on plates, studs and rim joists — the wood termites reach first
- Odourless, fast-drying, no schedule lost for subs
- Also stops carpenter ants and decay fungi in the framing
- Locked into the wood for the life of the house
One morning inside your framing stage.
The perimeter & letter
$310once, at final grade
- Post-backfill soil treatment at the foundation line
- Expansion joints and utility penetrations treated
- The closing letter: maps, batches, warranty — WDI-ready
- Reissued free for the first buyer’s lawyer
The document the closing asks for by name.
Why pretreat at all
They find the house before the siding does
Termite swarmers map new construction the spring the lots clear — and the soil under a fresh slab is warm, moist and permanently undisturbed, which is the exact real estate a colony spends its life looking for. A pretreat puts a treated zone where they will be digging, years before the mortgage has a second signature. After the slab is down, reaching that soil again means drilling a finished floor and pumping under a living room — the same chemistry at ten times the access problem, and none of the warranty.
Paper with a spine
The letter is the product
Anybody can spray soil; what a builder can hand a buyer is a document. Every Borate & Beam treatment files a coverage map, batch numbers, the weather at application and the technician’s licence the same evening, and the perimeter visit binds them into one letter an inspector, a lawyer and an insurer can each read without calling us. When the first buyer’s agent asks for the wood-destroying-insect report two years after you have moved to the next build, we reissue it from the file in a day, free, with your name still on it.
The pretreat sequence
Footing inspection to final letter
Four visits that never slow your schedule — two of them happen inside stages you already have trades on site for.
Plans & take-off
Square footage comes off your drawings the day you send them — one printed price per program, no walk required, no fuel surcharge hiding in the invoice.
The soil, before the barrier
The crew lands between grading and vapour barrier, treats every square foot to the label — joints, penetrations and thickened edges included — and photographs the coverage map before the plastic hides the work.
The framing pass
One morning inside your framing stage: borate on plates, studs and rims, dry by lunch, no odour for the subs who follow, nothing on the critical path.
Final grade & the letter
After backfill, the soil ring at the foundation line — the six feet a colony actually crosses — and the whole file becomes the letter, issued the same week.
Last season, Dunmore Flats
Pretreats, on the record
Six builds from last season, photographed the day the crew was on them. Every one of them carries a file your buyer’s inspector can read without a phone call — which is the whole reason builders keep us on the bid sheet.
The pretreat arithmetic
The pretreat is less than half a percent of a build’s cost, and it is the only line on the sheet that protects the other ninety-nine and a half from the one insect that eats a house from inside its own structure. Concrete, lumber and labour all rise every year; the soil treatment under them stays at pennies a foot — the cheapest decade of protection a finished floor will ever have.
Ten years, transferable once
If termites breach treated soil under a slab we pretreated, remediation and retreatment are ours for ten years — and the warranty follows the deed to your first buyer, batch record attached, so the promise is an asset at closing rather than a favour. It has been written once per house since 2004, and the second paragraph has never had to be written at all.
Ninth build with Borate & Beam. The crew treats the soil the afternoon my grader finishes and the barrier goes down the next morning like clockwork — I have never lost a pour day to pre-treatment, and the letter shows up before my framing inspection does. My buyers’ agents stopped asking the termite question entirely.
We added the borate pass on a spec house after the buyer’s inspector flagged a neighbour’s swarm history. One morning in framing, no smell, no delay, and the inspector wrote up the pretreat file as a selling point instead of a condition. The house closed nine days early.
Their perimeter visit caught a detail nobody else quotes: the bath-trap opening and the utility penetrations, treated and photographed on the map. Two winters later a termite swarm hit the cul-de-sac and took out two garages on the street — not one treated slab on the file was touched.
Before the bid sheet
What builders ask first
The five every pretreat call gets to within a minute. The office answers the number at the foot of the page from six, because footing inspections happen at seven.
My inspector says pretreats are optional in this jurisdiction.
Code is a floor, not a schedule of what survives. Around Dunmore Flats the soil is leaf-mould over clay — exactly what subterranean termites tunnel through — and half the closing lawyers here ask for a WDI letter on resale regardless of what code required at build. A pretreat is the only termite work that costs dimes and happens before the house exists; every later treatment costs dollars and happens after.
Does the treatment hold up my pour?
Never. The crew treats between grading and vapour barrier — a window you already have — and a residential slab takes two to four hours, photographing the map as they go. Your barrier crew follows the same day. In twenty-two seasons we have not cost a builder a pour date, and the schedule is confirmed against your inspector’s calendar, not ours.
What if it rains between treatment and pour?
A label-rate soil treatment binds to soil quickly, and a normal rain after application is not a re-treatment trigger — the label, not folklore, decides. If a washout event takes soil off the pad, we re-read the grades and touch down again before the barrier, at no charge, and the file says exactly that. What we will not do is treat into standing water and call it done.
Does the borate affect finishes or fasteners?
No. The framing borate is water-based, odourless, dries in hours and does not corrode fasteners, react with adhesives or bleed through paint the way old oil-borne preservatives did. Drywall and trim go on exactly as scheduled — many of our builders cannot tell we attended except by the invoice and the file.
The buyer’s lawyer wants the termite letter for closing.
That letter is the third program, and it is why the file exists. Coverage maps, batch numbers, dates, weather and licence all bind into one WDI-ready document at final grade, reissued free for the first buyer. If a lawyer anywhere on the Flats has a format they like, we have almost certainly written for them before — ask for it by name.
Booking
Hold the window
Send the address and the pour date, and the soil crew is confirmed against your inspection calendar the same day — the file opens before the barrier goes down. Builders get the printed program sheet by email within the hour. pretreat@borateandbeam.example