Restoration Primer: Fire the Carpenter Ants on Your Job

After years of finding carpenter ants in other people’s buildings, it has finally happened to me. I was about 4 feet from my single-story wood-frame garage, when I heard a “skritching” sound coming from the clapboard wall. The sound was not faint. Even with cars passing nearby, I heard it quite plainly. I put my ear to the wall and confirmed the source of the sound: the methodical crunching of wood fibers as the pesky little beggars gnawed out the side of my garage. On someone else’s building it’s an interesting problem with effective, but sometimes expensive, solutions. When it’s your own home it’s malicious destruction of property. I grabbed a pry bar and a spray can of the worst