Termite Control in Los Altos, CA

Local Context

Most of Los Altos Was Framed in One Postwar Building Boom

Los Altos filled in fast after it incorporated in 1952, and the ranch houses that went up through the 1950s and 1960s are now sixty to seventy years old. That is one generation of framing lumber reaching the same age at once. Western drywood termites (Incisitermes minor) live entirely inside a wood member, with no soil contact, no mud tubes and nothing outside the house to notice. Give a colony six decades and a winter that never turns properly cold, and it can work a rafter over a Country Club District garage for years before the first frass pellets land on the floor.

Two very different foundations sit under that framing. Ranch houses through North Los Altos and off Grant Road mostly rest on raised floors over vented crawl spaces, which gives an inspector somewhere to read the sill plate and the joist ends. The city's post-and-beam houses sit on slab with no attic at all, so the structural wood is either overhead in the open or buried at the perimeter. Eichler built only two small tracts here, the 37 houses of Fallen Leaf Park in 1967 and 1968 and eight more off Parsons Way, but the flat-roofed, exposed-beam idea spread well beyond them. Along Adobe Creek, Hale Creek and Permanente Creek the soil holds water into early summer, and that is where subterranean termites (Reticulitermes) come up through a slab crack or a stem wall instead.

Los Altos takes roughly fifteen to seventeen inches of rain a year, nearly all of it between November and March. June through August is effectively dry. The framing swells through winter, dries hard through summer, and nothing here gets cold enough to slow a colony. That is why so much of what turns up on a first inspection predates the current owner.