Fortunately, the damage to my home was limited to something I was removing anyway, but, even so, the problem needed to be tackled before any renovation could be carried out. In this case, we had an L-shaped addition, covered with asphalt shingles as was common in the 1950s, coated instead with stucco, because the rest of the house was brick. We couldn’t afford brick and complete the rest of the renovations we wanted, so stucco was the compromise.

Although it is dangerous to generalize, most real estate agents suggest that termite infestation is more common in houses more than ten years old. An important reason is that foundation construction methods have changed in the last decade to reduce the likelihood of termite damage.

If you are considering an addition, you should ask your contractor to look into these new methods to ensure that you won’t have to be spending big bucks on repairs and treating termite infestation a few years down the road.

Termite infestation requires wood from a structure to come directly in contact with the soil. What builders have started doing is constructing termite barriers to prevent such contact. One barrier is made of stone and looks like very coarse, sharp sand. Granite is crushed and graded to a specific size and shape of particle.

These particles are too big for termites to move, too small for them to go between, too hard to chew, and too sharp to push through. They are then packed into all the termite-entry points of a new building—for example, exterior perimeter wall cavities and pipes through slabs.

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