Threshold Pest Collective · Larkmoor, Adderfold & the Weirfield commons · Worker-owned since 2014
A pest is a hole in a house. Close the hole.
Services
The four disciplines
01
Exclusion audit & seal — $360 flat
Two techs, one day, every gap a pencil passes: door sweeps cut and set, copper mesh packed into the pipe penetrations, weep-hole gauze, dryer-vent screens, the sleeve behind the AC line. You get a photograph of every gap before it is closed and a map of where each one was. The median house here holds thirty-one; the audit finds them all.
02
Rodent trap-out & exclusion — $340
Snap traps, two weeks, counted every second day — never poison in a wall, where a mouse dies and announces it for a month. Then the exclusion that makes the third week unnecessary: sweeps, mesh, screens, and the droppings wet-cleaned with disinfectant, never swept dry.
03
Ant bait-matrix curatory — $165
The species names the bait: sweet gel for the odorous house ants that bud under spray, protein stations for the pavement ants of early spring, borate liquid on the fence lines against the Argentine supercolonies. The trail dies at the colony in days, and the sill they used is sealed on the same visit.
04
Wasp & hornet work — from $92
Vespiaries treated at dusk while the colony is home, removed on the second visit, the void packed. In May the founding queens get a repellent band on the eaves — the cheapest wasp work a house will ever be offered, because one queen is forty wasps by July.
How every job runs
Survey, seal, bait, prove
Find every gap
Torch, mirror and a pencil — if the pencil passes, the gap goes on the map. Garage thresholds, weep holes, the joint where the deck meets the wall: the census that makes everything after it possible.
Seal it
Mesh, gauze, sweeps, screens — hand-fit, photographed, listed. Not foam, which a mouse treats as a mattress, and not a flattened bead of caulk over a live gap.
Bait what remains
For the voids that cannot be sealed and the colonies already inside: gel, borate, locked stations. The least chemistry that closes the file, placed where the animal lives.
Prove it
Tracking dust at the old entries and monitors on the routes: two clean reads, a fortnight apart, before the collective calls a house done. The proof goes on the sheet you keep.
The one-year seal
Every gap the collective closes stays closed for a year — mesh, sweep, gauze and screen, labor and materials. A seal that fails is a seal done wrong, and it is re-done free, with no debate about who nailed what to where.
Why exclusion first
The trade most houses actually need
Seven calls in ten on the commons are a house with the door open — ants at a sill gap, mice at the garage threshold, wasps at the unscreened vent. Sealing closes the file on all three and costs less than a decade of quarterly spray. The collective places chemistry too, when a colony is already inside — but the estimate always shows the seal, because the seal is the part that is still working next winter.
Printed, worker-set, no contract
Commons rates
Three ways to hire the collective. The rates are set at the January meeting and printed here the same week — the seasonal routes are the wage, the one-off visit is the introduction.
The Survey Visit
$149one-time
- Full gap census with the pencil rule
- Tracking dust on the old routes
- Placement where a colony is active
- The map and the photographs, yours to keep
- Itemized estimate for any seal work
- Quarterly monitoring
The census alone runs eleven pages on the median house.
The Commons Season
$44/ month
- April-to-November route, six visits
- Every seal inspected, every visit
- Wasp queen band on the eaves each May
- Unlimited call-backs in season
- Cancel any month — a route, not a contract
The Whole Threshold
$79/ month
- Everything in the Commons Season
- The full exclusion audit in year one
- December-to-March rodent watch
- Attic and crawlspace read each spring
- One seal re-fit a year, anywhere on the sheet
From the route sheets
The seal wall
Six photographs off last season’s audits — the gaps before the mesh, the sills under the sweeps, the vents behind the gauze. Exclusion photography is unglamorous by nature; so is the work, and it is the work that lasts.
The collective, in figures
They found thirty-eight gaps in a house three companies had sprayed since before we bought it. Sealed in a day, photographed on a sheet we keep with the deed, and the ants — the entire reason for any of it — were gone in a fortnight and have stayed gone. The seal warranty is the best term in the trades.
The mouse situation was annual and the answer was always boxes of poison. The collective trapped them out in two weeks, wet-cleaned the droppings properly, and sealed the garage threshold so hard the annual part of the problem simply stopped. Third winter now with an empty trap line.
I hired them for wasps and left with a seal on the whole eave line. The May queen band is the clever part — no nests to remove in July because no queen ever signed a lease. The route sheet is honest work in writing and the crew explains every line of it.
Before you call
Asked over the fence
The five that come up at the route stops. Anything else, the shop answers the number below, seven to five, commons-wide.
Why not just spray?
Because spray answers this week and the gap answers forever. Odorous house ants bud under spray — one colony becomes five and the problem becomes hereditary — while a seal closes the door the colony used and a bait matrix closes the colony itself. We spray nothing a seal and a bait can finish, and that is most houses.
Is any of it safe for the chickens?
The exclusion work is carpentry — mesh, gauze and sweeps, nothing a bird can taste. Baits sit in locked stations inside voids the flock cannot reach, the borate lines run outside the run, and the tracking dust is talc-fine and placed under sills. The route sheet lists every placement; the hens will ignore all of them.
What is the pencil rule?
A gap a pencil can pass is a gap a mouse can use, and the census does not close until every one of them is on the sheet. Mice pass 6 millimetres — the width of the pencil — and rats take a thumb. The rule sounds quaint until you find the thirty-first gap behind the AC line that a decade of sprays missed.
What if the ants are already inside the wall?
Then the matrix goes to work: gel on the interior trail lines the workers carry home, a borate line at the colony’s edge, and the sill sealed once the trail goes quiet. Interior placements are void work with a forty-five-minute re-entry — kids, dogs and dinner plans all resume the same evening.
What does the one-year seal cover?
Materials and labor on every gap the collective closed: mesh, sweeps, gauze, screens and the AC-line sleeve. Weather does not void it, a contractor unplugging a gauze gets it re-fit free once, and the second time we have a conversation about the contractor. The term is the whole pitch — seals are the part of this trade that still works next winter.
Route stops run April through November · winter rodent watch on the Whole Threshold plan · (555) 035-2289 · commons@thresholdpest.example
Book the census
Town, the age of the house, and what has been getting in. The census takes half a day, the sheet and the photographs are yours whatever you decide, and the seal quote is itemized down to the gap. commons@thresholdpest.example