Pest control in Sun City, AZ
Sun City opened in 1960 with five house models. Sixty-five years later no two of them are quite the same, and what somebody added in 1987 usually matters more to a pest problem than the original drawing does.
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Five house models, and sixty-five years of changes
Sun City opened on 1 January 1960 with five home models, one golf course, a shopping centre and a recreation centre. The opening weekend drew a hundred thousand people, roughly ten times the number expected.
That is the founding story, and it is where every other pest control page about this place stops. It is worth carrying one step further. A town that began with five floor plans ought to be the easiest survey in Arizona: see five houses and you have seen them all. It does not work out that way. Those houses have passed through three, four, five sets of owners since, and every one of them changed something.
The community has said as much in writing. The single-family CC&Rs that the Sun City Home Owners Association enforces contain a clause headed Existing Conditions; Limited Grandfathering, sitting alongside sections on Construction Standards, Setback Requirements, Wall and Fence Restrictions and Detached or Temporary Structures. Those are rules drafted by people who know the buildings have drifted away from the original drawings and from each other.
So a survey here does not start from the plan. It starts by working out what was done to this particular house, and roughly when. An untouched block house from 1962 and a 1962 block house with a roofed patio, a converted carport and refrigerated air where the evaporative cooler used to be are two different buildings that share an original drawing and nothing else that matters to us.
What gets added, and what each addition does
A handful of changes turn up on these lots again and again, and each one creates a problem you can predict before you arrive.
The closed-in carport is the commonest of them. A carport is a roof on posts; a room is a sealed box. When one becomes the other, the join between the original wall and the new one is the weak point, and so is the edge of the slab, which was poured as an outside edge and now finds itself under a floor. Ants and roaches work that line for years before anyone thinks to look at it.
Roofed patios and Arizona rooms are the same story at a larger scale. Where the addition stands on its own footing instead of sharing the house’s, there is a joint between two pieces of concrete that move at different rates, and that joint is a route. Where the addition covers what used to be the back garden, the irrigation and the planting that were there are now underneath it.
The switch from evaporative cooling to refrigerated air leaves a hole. Every house here was built with a cooler, a great many now run on a heat pump, and the old opening in the roof or the wall was patched by whoever did the job. Some of those patches are excellent. Some are a sheet of metal and a bead of sealant that has had twenty summers on it, and that is among the first places we look when something is getting into a roof space.
Then there is plumbing. A house of this age has had drains relined, a water heater moved, a softener fitted, and each of those jobs cut a new hole through a wall or a slab. Walls and gates go the same way: block gets rebuilt, gates get replaced, and the gap under a new gate is rarely the gap that was there before.
None of this is a complaint about the houses. It is why a survey here takes longer than the same survey on a subdivision finished last year, and it is why we ask what you know about the history of the building. If a previous owner left paperwork, it is worth more to us than a description of the pest. Where a finding is structural rather than biological, our termite inspection page sets out what a formal report can and cannot say.
The work we do not hand back to you
Three quarters of Sun City is sixty-five or over, and the average household here holds 1.63 people. That ought to change what a visit includes, and on most quotes it does not.
A standard inspection finishes with a list of homework. Check the roof space. Empty the cupboard under the sink and look at the back of it. Shift the boxes in the store room. Get up and run your eye along the roofline. Clear the leaf litter. Every one of those is a fair request to make of somebody who is going to do it, and collectively they are where a great many treatments quietly fail, because nobody does them and nobody admits it.
We would rather do them ourselves. When we survey a house here, we are the ones who look in the roof space, empty the cupboard and put it back as it was, move the boxes and return them, and check the gap behind the water heater while we are already on the floor. That is not a special service and it is not a favour. It is what makes the report worth reading, because an inspection that relies on the customer inspecting the awkward half of it is not an inspection.
The same goes for what follows. If the finding is a vent that needs new mesh or a gate that needs a sweep, we would rather fit it than write it down for you. Where something falls outside what we do, we say so and describe what needs doing, so the next trade you ring is the right one.
One thing this is not: a reason to treat anybody as fragile. Plenty of people here will be up the ladder before we are and mildly irritated by the suggestion that they should not be. The point is narrower. A survey that depends on somebody else doing half of it is an unreliable survey, whoever happens to live in the house.
Who is actually responsible for what
Sun City has no city. It is an unincorporated community in Maricopa County, and three separate bodies handle things a town hall would deal with elsewhere.
Maricopa County is the authority. The county enforces the ordinances that apply here, including animal control, noise and hours of construction, and the county is who you call about a vector complaint. A vector complaint — standing water, flies, a feral bee colony, rats — goes to Maricopa County Environmental Services on 602-506-6616. There is no municipal programme running alongside that, because there is no municipality to run one.
The Sun City Home Owners Association has enforced the CC&Rs since 1963, and it states its first responsibility as protecting the age overlay. Worth knowing: membership is voluntary and costs twenty-five dollars a year. An association that is charged with the community standard but cannot oblige anybody to join it is an unusual arrangement, and it means the answer to whether the association will deal with something is less predictable here than in a development with mandatory dues.
Recreation Centers of Sun City is a third organisation again, running eight recreation centres and eight golf courses and holding ground that belongs to nobody’s back garden, Viewpoint Lake and the Sun Bowl among it. If pressure is coming off that land, the report goes to them rather than to the association.
And if you are in one of the condominium communities, you have a separate association and a separate set of CC&Rs on top of all of it. Telling us which of those you fall under, when you ring, saves a visit later.
Roof rats, old citrus and watered ground
Sun City is compact, about fourteen and a half square miles, and a good deal of what sits inside that is watered.
Eight golf courses, a lake, and sixty-five years of planting in gardens laid out when nobody thought twice about irrigation. Where there is old citrus there are roof rats, and this is a place with a great deal of old citrus. The route rarely varies: fruit left on the ground, a branch or a fence resting against the roofline, then into the roof space through a vent or through that patched cooler opening.
Picking the fruit up matters more than anything we spray, and so does cutting back whatever touches the roof. Those two jobs done in October are worth more than a treatment in January. If they are jobs you would rather not be doing, they belong on the list of things we will deal with while we are there.
The courses and the lake are maintained ground and not yours to treat. What they mean for your lot is that water is never far off, which tends to show up as mosquito pressure in the week after rain rather than as a year-round argument.
Scorpions, and a slab that has been there sixty-five years
A house standing on the same concrete since the sixties has had a long time to develop the gaps that matter.
Concrete settles, stucco cracks at the corners, expansion joints open up, and the sealant round a window frame is only ever as old as the last person who did it. Bark scorpions are flat enough to use any of that, and they climb, so a gap at head height is as much a way in as one at floor level. On a house that has been added to, the newest gaps are usually at the junctions, where somebody joined new work to sixty-year-old block.
We survey for them after dark, with ultraviolet light, because on a lot this size a guess is worse than nothing at all. What comes out of it is a list of particular gaps, and most of them are small jobs: mesh, sealant, a door sweep, a vent cover. Scorpion control covers the method, and if what you are dealing with is one stubborn gap at the base of a wall, our note on sealing a foundation gap works through it properly.
What changes the price in Sun City
Two lots a few doors apart can be quite different jobs here, and the difference is nearly always what was added and what can be got at.
An unaltered house is quick. A house carrying a closed-in carport, a roofed patio and an Arizona room has three junctions to examine that the original building never had, and one or more of them may need opening up before anybody can say what is behind it. Storage is the other variable, because a garage or a store room filled to the ceiling has to be worked through before the wall behind it can be seen at all.
A rental changes who we talk to rather than what it costs. A condominium changes what is actually yours to treat, since the association may hold the exterior. Clubs, offices and the shopping centres are a different kind of job again and sit on our commercial pest control page.
We put a figure to the work after walking round it, never before, and the figure arrives with a written note of what was inspected and what was not. If you are weighing us against a number somebody gave you over the phone, ask them which additions they were pricing for. On a house in Sun City that is very nearly the whole question.
Sun City pest control questions
Which Sun City do you mean?
There are several and they are genuinely different places. Sun City is the original, opened in 1960 and unincorporated. Sun City West was built from 1978 and is a separate community with its own organisations. Sun City Grand came in the late 1990s and sits inside the city of Surprise, which we cover on our Surprise page. Youngtown, next door, is older still and is its own town. Peoria wraps around much of the rest and, unlike any of these, is an incorporated city with programmes of its own. We work across all of them; the reason we ask is that the buildings and the rules are not the same.
Do I need to be a SCHOA member for you to work on my house?
No. Membership of the Sun City Home Owners Association is voluntary, costs twenty-five dollars a year, and is separate from your recreation fees, which catches a lot of people out. It has nothing to do with hiring a contractor. What the association does affect is the CC&Rs, so if a recommendation of ours touches a wall, a gate or a detached structure, that is the document to check before the work is done.
There is no city here, so who do I call about standing water and mosquitoes?
Maricopa County. The number for Environmental Services is 602-506-6616, and it is the right one for standing water, flies, a bee colony or rats alike, whether the problem sits on a verge, in a basin or on a neighbouring lot nobody is living on. If the water is on ground the Recreation Centers of Sun City maintain, tell them as well, because they are the ones who can actually go and move it.
The house has had a lot done to it and I do not know who did it. Is that a problem?
Not for us, and it is the normal situation on a house that has changed hands several times. The survey is how we find out. If you do happen to have paperwork from a previous owner, a permit, an invoice, even a note about when the room was added, bring it out, because it turns a couple of hours of working it out into ten minutes of reading.
Is a sixty-five-year-old house harder to protect than a new one?
Not harder, different. A house finished last year fails at points you can list before you get out of the van, because everything in it was built at once to one specification. A house from the early sixties fails where somebody joined new work to old, and nobody can list those in advance because they are specific to that building. It takes longer to find them. Once they are found and closed they tend to stay closed, because nothing else about the house is going to move.
Will you move things to get to the back of a cupboard, or should I do it first?
Leave it to us. Clearing the cupboard under the sink, shifting boxes in a store room and getting into the roof space are part of the survey rather than preparation for it, and they go back where they were before we leave. If there is something you would rather we did not handle, say so and we will work round it.
Do you treat bed bugs in Sun City?
Yes. In an age-restricted community the treatment is rarely the hard part — the preparation is. A bed bug job normally asks for bedding stripped and bagged, clothing laundered hot, furniture pulled away from the walls and the rooms left empty for several hours. That is a fair ask of some households and plainly an unfair one for others. Say so before you book, because it changes what we recommend rather than what we charge.
Who does the preparation for a bed bug treatment?
As much of it as needs doing. Handing over a checklist that will not realistically get finished, then calling the result a failed treatment, is not something we are willing to do. Where prep is the obstacle we lean towards heat, which finishes in a day, over a chemical programme that wants repeat access and the room kept clear in between. The full picture is on our bed bug treatment page.
Related services
Rodent Control in Phoenix
Old citrus, the roofline, and the patched cooler opening they climb in through.
Scorpion Control in Phoenix
An after-dark survey, then the particular gaps a house of this age has.
Termite Inspection
What a formal report covers when a property is changing hands.
Termite Control in Phoenix
Where an addition meets the original concrete, and what happens next.
Cockroach Control in Phoenix
Drain lines, relined plumbing and the cupboards they turn up in.
All Service Areas
The other places on our round, and the local thing that decides each visit.
Tell us what has been added to the house
A closed-in carport, a roofed patio, an Arizona room, refrigerated air where the cooler used to be — whatever you know about, and whatever you only half know about. Knowing that before we arrive changes where the survey starts and how long it takes.