Back for the Season? Run This Pest Check Before You Unpack

You pull into the driveway after six months up north, the house is stuffy, and all you want is to get the cooler inside and turn on the AC. Give the place about 20 minutes first. A home that sat closed through the summer can pick up visitors you won’t see from the front door, and the first walk-through is when the clues are easiest to read.

The short version: check the outside before you open every door, run water in every drain, and look along the floors and in the cabinets before you put food away. Most of what you find will be minor. A few signs are worth a call.

Start outside, before the doors are propped open

Walk the outside slowly with the keys still in your hand. You are looking for anything that set up shop while the house was quiet.

• Shutters, covers and eaves. Wasps and spiders can build in shutter tracks, under patio furniture covers and along soffits that nobody touched all summer. Look before you roll a shutter up or pull a grill cover off.
• Doors and garage edges. Note any chewed or torn door sweep, a gap at the bottom of the garage door, or a fresh opening where a pipe or cable enters the wall.
• Fruit trees and palms. Fallen fruit and seed pods that piled up under trees can feed rodents. A rotting pile right beside the house is worth noting.
• Standing water. Plant saucers, buckets, kids’ toys and clogged gutters can all hold rainwater, and mosquitoes can breed in surprisingly small amounts of it. Tip them out.

If you see an active wasp nest near a door you need to use, use another door and leave the nest alone. Swatting at it from a ladder is how a homecoming turns into an urgent care visit.

Inside: run every drain and read the floors

Open the house up, then work room by room.

Run water in every drain. That means every sink, tub, shower, floor drain and the washing machine standpipe if you can reach it. Drains have a U-shaped trap that holds water and seals off the pipe. Over months without use, that water can evaporate. A dry trap can let sewer odors and small drain-dwelling insects up into the room. A minute of running water usually restores the seal. A sour smell from one drain that doesn’t clear after the water runs is worth mentioning to a plumber or to us, depending on what you see near it.

Look at the floor line. Check behind the toilet, under sinks, along baseboards, inside the pantry and under the stove edge. You are looking for droppings, small piles of wings, shed skins, dead insects and chewed packaging.

Open the cabinets before you stock them. Anything left in the pantry from last season deserves a look. Pantry pests can settle into open flour, cereal, rice or pet food that sat for months.

Notice the air. A musty, damp smell after a long closed-up summer can mean humidity ran high. Damp spots under sinks, around the AC closet or near windows matter because moisture draws roaches and other pests.

What the signs can and can’t tell you

Here is how to read the clues people find most often on arrival day.

• A few dead roaches on their backs. This is common in a closed house and doesn’t prove an active problem by itself. Sweep them up, then watch for live ones, especially at night in the kitchen and bathrooms over the next week.
• Live roaches in daylight. That is a stronger sign. Roaches usually hide during the day, so seeing them out in the open can mean there are more nearby.
• Droppings in one cabinet or behind the fridge. These show a rodent traveled there. They don’t tell you the species, how many, or whether it is still inside. Fresh droppings after you clean up are the real signal.
• Ant trails the day you bring groceries home. Ants find new food fast. A trail into the kitchen on day one usually means they followed the food in, and keeping food sealed and counters clean is the first move.
• Bites around the ankles in a home where pets lived before you left. Fleas can wait in their cocoons for a host to come back and then emerge when the house gets busy again. If you get bites in the first few days and you had pets in the house last season, it is worth getting checked.

Found droppings? Don’t sweep them

Rodent droppings and nesting material should not be swept or vacuumed. Disturbing them dry can put contaminated particles into the air. Open windows to air the room out first, keep kids and pets away, and follow safe cleanup instructions for wet cleaning before you touch anything. If the droppings are in the attic, inside ductwork, in insulation or anywhere you can’t reach safely, leave them in place and ask for guidance.

The first week back

The walk-through covers day one. A few habits over the next week help you catch what it missed.

• Unpack suitcases on a hard floor or in the garage, and check the seams before bags go into closets. Bed bugs can hitchhike in luggage from hotels and stops along the drive.
• Keep cardboard boxes that sat in the garage all summer out of the kitchen and closets until you have looked through them. Roaches like cardboard.
• Get the AC running and the humidity down. A drier house is a less friendly house for many pests.
• Take trash out on schedule and keep lids closed. The first few days back usually produce more trash than normal.

If you live in a condo, note where you saw activity. Signs near shared walls, garbage chutes or hallway doors may involve the association, so tell management what you found and where.

When to call, and what to tell us

Match the response to what you actually found:

1. Nothing beyond a few dead insects: clean up, run the drains again later in the week, and keep watching.
2. Live roaches, repeat ant trails or droppings that come back after cleanup: a property-specific inspection makes sense. Write down where you saw each sign and roughly when.
3. Droppings in the attic or ductwork, chewed wiring, an active nest by a door, or flea bites: get help instead of handling it yourself.

When you call, tell us how long the home sat empty, whether anyone checked on it while you were away and exactly where each sign showed up. That helps the technician start in the right rooms.

If you are planning next summer already, our guide on how to protect a vacant home between visits covers the closing-up side. For rodent signs, see our rodent control page. For anything else on your walk-through list, contact Pest Busterzz and describe what you found.