We. Have. Termites.
Well, we HAD termites. We got rid of them. After six months of living in our new home, we broke into a wall and discovered that there was nothing there but chewed, flaky, termite-damaged wood behind it. Terrifying. The previous home owners didn’t disclose damage, and our inspector didn’t catch it. Did we panic? YES! How could everyone have missed this massive issue? Did the previous owners really not know? Did we hire a bunk inspector? How bad is the damage? Are the termites still alive? How much was this going to cost? What do we do next?

Let me back up and start from the beginning. What tipped us off to termites in the first place? As you know, David and I do A LOT of home renovations. As first time home owners, we have run into a ton of questionable things while doing projects. We ask ourselves, “is this normal?” often. Most of the time we can figure it out, or we just let it be. So how did we determine we had termites? And how can you do the same? I want to share our story with you, so you will know what to watch out for.

When we were refreshing the dining room, and I was painting the walls, there was a sorta mushy spot below the window sill.

Here’s a close up of the mushy spot:

I didn’t think much of it- I figured it wasn’t bad, but it probably wasn’t good. I asked David and he said maybe a little water is getting in there somehow. We added it to the list of things to keep an eye on.

I also noticed there were pin sized holes in the drywall, but I didn’t think anything of them. I figured the previous owners had maybe hung something there with push pins. Again, I didn’t think it was anything to cause concern. Here’s what it looked like up close:

I also noticed that there was the same sort of mushy spot in the upstairs bedroom that we loving call the “pink room”. This is the room where we have the adorable and Pinterest popular diy door daybed. This mushy spot was again, around a window sill. It was on the middle window, where there is flower painting below. This spot was MUCH worse than the one downstairs.

David thought maybe water was getting in that window somehow, and that maybe our roof needed to be checked out. We called a roof guy, he came out and declared that our roof was fine, but that our windows needed to be sealed better. He instructed David to caulk around all the windows on the outside. Which he did.

This room also had a bunch of pin holes in the walls:

Again, I didn’t think much of them because this room was a heavily used little girl’s room before we moved in. It had a ton of nicks and dings and little pin holes in all the walls. I knew they hung a lot of plants and frames and kid knick knacks in here, so I didn’t think anything of these. There was also a lot of cracks in the drywall around the windows, but I just dismissed this because I knew the house had foundation issues and it was old. Every room had cracks in the walls!

There were also these brown dirt spots on the window wall that I dismissed as yucky kid stuff. When we re-did the little boy’s room I literally found boogers on the wall, so the brown dirt didn’t set off any alarms in here:

Once we sealed the windows, we thought the mushy spots would harden up and dry out. Nope. They remained wet and mushy. David went back and resealed again. Still mushy. We kept an eye on it, but figured it wasn’t too big of a deal.

Our big termite wake-up call happened when I discovered a pile of dead ant-like bugs in the mushy corner of the upstairs window sill. I showed David the dead bugs and his face turned white. He knew immediately that they were termites. We then took it upon ourselves to bust into the wall and see what was going on. This is a cleaned up version of what we discovered in the pink room:

The wood framing in the walls was all rotted away. It was like paper! The wood was wet and had mud all over it. We quickly sealed it up and went downstairs to see the other mushy spot in the dining room. This is what we saw down there:

I’m no expert or anything, but I’m pretty sure that the vertical piece of wood should be connected to the horizontal piece of wood. We knew we had a BIG PROBLEM on our hands. We sealed up this hole and quickly called a termite guy.

Termite guy came out and gave us an education. Apparently, we have two types of termites. The first big-damage causing termites we have are called subterranean termites. They are responsible for all the mysterious things I detailed above. These guys build ant-pile type nests in soil under or around your house. They then build mud tunnels up your walls and into your house wood. Learn more about them here. Our house sits on a pier and beam frame, so their nest was under our house. Our inspector didn’t catch the nest because she never crawled under our house – yippee. These termites love moisture, so they are abundant in Houston. We had a lovely 10-year-old-colony on our hands. Subterranean termites chew vertically, so they made a nest under our dining room window, then chewed up the pieces of framing that went all the way up into the pink room on the second floor and almost to our roofline. Here’s a grubby photo of the back-side of our house so you can see the scope of the damage. They ate from the bottom floor by the window, almost to the roof.

All the signs were there, we just missed them. These termites like a wet and muddy environment, so those mushy spots on our walls were indications that the wood was wet and mushy under there because of the termites. The pin-sized holes? That was caused by the moisture bubbling up and escaping through the latex wall paint. The brown spots- that’s termite poopie! They eat and poop and sometimes it’s so much that it pushes out into your walls! GROSS! The cracks around the windows? That was caused by our house literally crumbling due to mushy paper-like framing boards being eaten by nasty termites.

We extinguished the termites and are now in the process of repairing the damage by a lovely construction company. They are going to replace the chewed-through foundational support beam, the framing beams around the window in the downstairs dining room and the upstairs pink room. They are going to have to rip-off and replace the stucco on the outside of the house and then re-drywall the inside of the house. All in all, they say it will take a month do, and it will cost us (GULP) around $15K – $20K. I fully plan on writing about our experience with them (good or bad) after the project is finished.

They started ripping out the damaged foundational support beam under the dining room, and this is what it looks like:

Can you believe that was holding up the mid-section of our house?!? Crazy!

Well, I hope you found this post helpful and informative. I will post more about the repair project and our second set of termites next. Until, then feel free to reach out if you have any questions or tips of your own.