Aldermoth & Kith, House Pest Curators · Wicksey, Old Trimble & the Chine hills
A quiet house is a kept house.
Aldermoth & Kith practices pest control the way a conservator practices preservation: survey first, sealing second, chemistry last and least — a dust in the wall voids, a bait where the colony lives, never a fog where a family eats. Four generations, one van, and a bound letter on every job naming what was found, what was placed, and when the children and the dog may come back in.
Four movements
The curatorial method
Survey
The house walked the way a museum walks a room — skirting to attic, every gap a pencil could pass, moisture readings at the sills. The survey is the work; everything after it follows from what it finds.
Exclude
Copper mesh, door sweeps, weep screens, vent gauze, the sleeve behind the pipe — sealed by hand, photographed, and listed in the letter. A sealed house is nine-tenths of any cure.
Place
What chemistry is needed goes where the animal lives, not where the people do: gel in the void, dust in the crack, bait in the locked box. Re-entry for children and pets is forty-five minutes, printed on the letter.
Report
A bound page for the house’s file: species, placements, re-entry, and the date of the next keeping. Houses here have files older than their owners.
Services & rates
The commission card
The card has carried the same headings since 1974; the figures are this season’s, from Wicksey to the Chine hills. The survey fee is credited against any commission begun within thirty days.
Full house survey & determination$140
Skirting to attic, moisture readings, gap survey, species identified — the bound letter with or without any treatment
Carpenter ant curatoryfrom $260
Night inspection with a red lens, galleries dusted directly, the moisture source that fed them named and quoted — frass is a leak wearing a disguise
Termite monitoring ring$680 install + $185 / yr
Twelve in-ground stations on a ten-foot grid, checked quarterly, baited only on a hit — elimination typically eight to fourteen weeks
Wardrobe & wool curatory$150
Pheromone lures, placement in the garment voids, and the freezer protocol written out for the house
Wasp & hornet vespiary workfrom $95
Treated at dusk when the colony is home, removed and the void sealed — a founding-queen band on the eaves each May for kept houses
The Keeping — quarterly$46 / month
Four seasonal visits on the curatorial calendar, monitors read, exclusions inspected, call-backs between
The house rule
Chemistry last, and then as little as possible
Eighty-eight percent of the files this practice closed last year ended without an insecticide in a living space — exclusion, a vacuum protocol, bait behind a locked box, a dust inside a void nobody touches. When chemistry is the right tool the letter says so plainly, names the product, and states the re-entry interval: forty-five minutes for gels and dusts, once set. The van has carried the same three products for eleven years; the trade is in knowing where, not what.
The 1938 terms
Ninety days on any treated file — if the named species returns, the follow-up is free and unhurried. Exclusion work — the mesh, the sweeps, the screens — is warranted for a year, because a seal that fails was a seal done wrong.
Wicksey to the Chine hills
Kept houses
Six keepings photographed at the survey and the final read. Nothing staged; the houses look like this because the files are old.
The practice, in figures
The house had carpenter ants in two sills and a man before Aldermoth who sprayed them, twice a year, for a decade. The survey found the roof leak feeding the galleries, the letter quoted the roofer, and the dust went into the voids once. That was four years ago. The file sits with the deeds, and the ant spray is a story we tell guests.
Before you write
Asked in the parlor
The five the survey letters raise most. Anything further, the desk answers the number below, Monday through Saturday.
Can you treat without chemicals entirely?
Often, yes — and it will say so on the determination. Exclusion, vacuum protocols, heat for a bed bug file, the freezer for the wools, a humidity note for the silverfish: these close a majority of the practice’s files. When a bait or a dust is genuinely the right tool, the letter will make the case and you will still be the one who decides.
What does re-entry mean for the dog?
Forty-five minutes after gels and dusts have set, the rooms are the rooms again. Placements live in voids — kick-plates, pipe chases, the backs of cabinets — not on floors or counters, and the letter maps every one. The aquarium is covered with the pump off as a matter of course, and hives on the property are flagged no-go for the day.
Our house is from the 1800s. Special concerns?
That is the practice’s native habitat. Old houses are pest problems made of gaps and moisture, and the curatorial method — survey, seal, place as little as possible — was built for them. Termite monitoring rings go around foundations that have stood two centuries; the ring’s job is to keep the third.
Why monitor instead of treat for termites?
Because a ring of twelve stations on a ten-foot grid tells you when a colony is actually near, and baits only then — which means the treatment is a letter you receive maybe once a decade instead of a trench through the cellar every spring. Elimination, when it is needed, runs eight to fourteen weeks, and the counts come with the quarterly check.
What do the 1938 terms actually promise?
Ninety days’ free re-course on any treated file, and a full year on exclusion seals. No asterisk about weather, tenancy or cleanliness — the terms were written when a handshake was the contract, and the practice has never seen a reason to modernize them into small print.
Surveys booked a fortnight out · written determinations within three days of the walk · (555) 034-7741 · desk@aldermothkin.example
Write the desk
The town, the age of the house, and what has been seen — a specimen in a jar answers half the survey before the van rolls. The determination is bound whether or not a commission follows. desk@aldermothkin.example