Caulking Bottom Framing Plates For Pest Control
Insects like ants and cockroaches, can fit through the
smallest cracks, whether they're on the outside of your house or they're
on the inside of your house, if these cracks are open, insects are going
to be using them on a regular basis.
A good place to start, will be your baseboards. It might be hard to
imagine, but the exterior walls of your house, are usually one of the
best places for small insects or house pets to enter. You're probably
thinking that the weight of the roof, would be enough to push the bottom
wall framing plate, tightly against the concrete foundation. Think
again.
This isn't going to be the case, most of the time and I recommend
caulking all of your base plate framing, before applying any drywall.
This can be done by running a small bead of caulking, along the bottom
of your exterior wall framing plates where they touch the concrete or
wood foundation floor.
Let me share a story with you, I was cleaning one of my room additions,
that was almost completed. The exterior walls were stuccoed and the
interior walls were finished with drywall and I had already installed
the wood floor trim around the perimeter of the room.
I had vacuumed everything up that was on the interior floor and it was
pretty clean, so I brought a leaf blower into the room, opened up all of
the windows and started to blow out the remaining dirt and dust. As I
was blowing around the baseboards at the bottom of the walls, I could
see dirt and dust blowing out of the exterior stucco near the weed
screed.
This is when it dawned on me, that these walls desperately needed to be
caulked or sealed somehow. You can always perform this test on your own,
or you could take my word for it.
Make sure that you always caulk around your exterior framing plates to
prevent small insects from easily entering your home on a regular basis.