1  What are you seeing?

Start with the thing in front of you. Each area lists the problems by the symptom you actually notice, because a 1978 crawlspace house and a 2005 slab house fail in completely different ways.

2  By the age of your house

Older does not mean worse. It means a different set of failures. Find the era your house was built and open the service you need.

3  What a proper job looks like

Most homeowners in Marietta meet pest control the same way: something appears in the kitchen, a company comes out, somebody sprays, and the problem is quiet for a few weeks. That cycle is not treatment. It is suppression, and it repeats because nothing about the conditions that produced the insect has changed.

A crew doing the job properly spends most of its first visit outside the building. They are reading the grade — which way water runs when a summer storm drops two inches in forty minutes. They are looking at where mulch sits against siding, where a downspout empties beside the foundation, where a crawl vent is blocked, where wood meets soil. In this county those details are the job. The chemistry is the easy part.

A thorough first visit includes a full exterior perimeter inspection; entry into the crawlspace if there is one, with a moisture reading; a check of the sill plate and band joist; identification of the actual species rather than “ants”; a written list of conducive conditions you can fix yourself; and a plan that says what is applied, where, and on what cadence. Ask for it in writing. General pest control across Cobb County.

4  Crawlspace or slab

Marietta is an old city with a young edge. The streets around the Square, the mid-century neighborhoods off Roswell Road and most of west Marietta are crawlspace construction. Push north and east into the newer subdivisions and you start finding slab. The median home here was built in 1978; ten miles north in Woodstock it is 2005. That is two genuinely different pest problems inside one market.

On a crawlspace home the inspector can see almost everything, provided they are willing to go under the house. Mud tubes climb the piers in plain sight, damage to joists is visible, moisture is measurable. The flip side is that a crawlspace is a humid void sitting directly on clay, and sustained humidity under a floor is the best predictor of termite activity within a few seasons. Moisture correction often has to come first.

On a slab home almost nothing is visible. Termites come up through expansion joints, plumbing penetrations and hairline cracks, and the first sign is usually damage to door frames or baseboards. There is no void to inspect, so the inspector reads the perimeter and infers.

If a company has not asked which one you have before quoting, they are not quoting your house. They are quoting an average.

5  Termites, and why Georgia is Zone 1

Metro Atlanta sits on Piedmont red clay. It holds water far longer than the sandy soil south of the fall line, and that extended moisture window is what lets eastern subterranean termite colonies forage year round here instead of seasonally. Georgia is rated Termite Infestation Probability Zone 1 — “very heavy” — the worst rating the map issues.

Swarm season runs March to May. On a warm, still afternoon after rain, winged reproductives leave the colony, fly badly, drop their wings and die in windowsills. Those discarded wings matter: a swarm inside the building means a colony is already established in or under the structure, not nearby.

Two treatment families, and they are not interchangeable. A liquid soil barrier means trenching and rodding the soil around the full foundation, drilling through slabs and porches where the barrier has to continue, and applying a non repellent termiticide so foragers pass through it and carry it back. Done properly it is a continuous, unbroken treated zone. Done lazily it is a trench on the three easy sides and nothing where the deck is in the way.

A bait system installs in-ground stations that termites find on their own, carrying a growth regulator back to the colony. It is slower, and it depends entirely on somebody servicing the stations on schedule. Neither approach is universally better — it comes down to your foundation, your access, and whether anyone will still be monitoring the property in year three. Termite control across Cobb County.

6  The Georgia termite letter

If you are buying or selling in Marietta, somebody will ask for a termite letter. The real name is the Official Georgia Wood Infestation Report, and it is far narrower than most people assume. It is a licensed inspector’s opinion, on a specific date, about visible evidence of wood destroying organisms in the accessible areas of the structure.

Those two qualifiers are where closings go wrong. Visible evidence means nothing behind finished walls counts. Accessible areas means a crawlspace with eighteen inches of clearance and standing water can be reported as inaccessible, and whatever is under there is simply not covered. A clean letter on a house with an inaccessible crawl tells you much less than the buyer thinks.

The report separates active infestation, previous infestation and damage. Previous evidence with no activity is extremely common in a Zone 1 state and is not by itself a reason to walk away. What matters is whether the damage was repaired, whether the structure was treated, and whether there is a transferable bond. The bond is a separate contract from the inspection — some cover retreatment only, some include repair of new damage with a cap. More on termite work and bonds.

7  Ants and roaches

Odorous house ants are the signature nuisance of a Marietta spring. Crush one and it smells faintly of rotten coconut, which is how you tell them from the rest. They nest in wall voids, under slabs, in mulch and in wet insulation, and they move indoors when it rains or when it gets hot and dry — both of which happen constantly here.

Carpenter ants are the ones worth taking seriously. They do not eat wood, they excavate it to nest, and they overwhelmingly choose wood that is already damp. A carpenter ant problem is nearly always a moisture problem in disguise: a leaking shower pan, a failed flashing detail, a roof valley that has been dripping into a wall for two years. Kill the ants, leave the leak, and you will be back.

German cockroaches are a separate discipline. They live in the kitchen and bath wet walls, breed faster than casual treatment can keep up with, and are largely unbothered by spray-and-leave. Gel bait placed where they actually harbor works. The regional cadence is a quarterly exterior perimeter treatment, because north Georgia has no dormant season, only a slower one. General pest control across Cobb County.

8  Mosquitoes

The species ruining your evenings is almost certainly the Asian tiger mosquito. It is a container breeder, it bites during the day, and it does not travel far — which is the useful part. If you are being bitten in your own yard, the water producing them is in your yard or next door, not at the creek down the hill.

A container is anything holding water for about a week: a clogged gutter, a saucer under a pot, a corrugated downspout extension, a tarp fold, a bird bath, a tire, the sump in an unused fountain. A lidless recycling bin left out in June will produce mosquitoes by July.

Barrier treatment is a residual applied to the undersides of foliage and other shaded resting sites. It works, for roughly three to four weeks. What it cannot do is outpace a breeding source you have left in place. A crew worth hiring walks the property, tells you which containers to dump, and then treats. Properties backing onto Sope Creek or Nickajack Creek run a longer season than the rest of the city. Mosquito control across Cobb County.

9  Rodents and wildlife

Roof rats and gray squirrels do not come in at ground level. They come in at the top: gable vents with failed screen, the gap where a ridge board meets the sheathing, the open soffit return above a porch roof, a rotted fascia board behind a gutter. Marietta’s mature hardwood canopy makes this easy, because half the houses in the older neighborhoods have limbs touching the roof.

Exclusion beats trapping, and it is not close. Trapping removes the animals currently in the attic. Exclusion — sealing every entry with material the animal cannot chew through, after confirming nothing is left inside — ends the problem. A crew that only sets traps is signing you up for the same visit next October. Ask whether the proposal includes sealing, what material is used, and whether the sealed points are guaranteed.

Trimming limbs back from the roof is the highest-value thing most Marietta homeowners can do themselves. Rodent and wildlife removal across Cobb County.

10  The pest calendar

January to February. The quietest stretch, and the best time to get an inspection and a plan in place before anything is urgent. Operators have calendar space now that they will not have in April.

March to May. Termite swarm season, climbing ant pressure, the first mosquitoes. The busiest period in the trade, and the period when a homeowner is most likely to be sold something under time pressure.

June to August. Peak mosquito and stinging insect season. Heat drives ants indoors looking for water, which is why you often see more of them in a dry spell than a wet one.

September to December. Rodents move toward the building as overnight temperatures drop. Wasps turn aggressive in early autumn as colonies peak and collapse. Termites are the exception to all of it — swarming is seasonal, foraging is not.

11  Choosing a company

Georgia requires a license to perform structural pest control. That is the floor, not a recommendation. Above the floor, the differences between companies show up in the proposal long before they show up in the work. Ask these, in this order:

• What is the measured linear footage of my foundation? For termite work this is the whole basis of the job.
• Which product, and is it repellent or non repellent? They should answer without checking.
• Is the warranty retreatment only, or does it include repair? And what is the cap?
• What do years two and three look like, in writing?
• Who does the work — your technician or a subcontractor?
• Will you put the inspection findings in writing, including conducive conditions?
• Is the bond transferable if I sell?

Walk away from: a quote given over the phone without anyone seeing the property; pressure to sign today; refusal to enter the crawlspace paired with a confident opinion about what is under there; a proposal that will not name the product; anyone who cannot explain the difference between the inspection and the bond.

Get two proposals. Not five — two competent ones, read side by side, tell you more than a stack. The full guide to choosing a company.

12  Questions

Jaylan Jones — Cobb County Pest Solutions publishes independent guidance for North Georgia homeowners. We are a referral service, not a licensed pest control contractor, and we do not perform the work. How we work.