The week between getting the keys and moving the furniture is the single best pest control window a home ever offers — empty rooms, bare floors, every skirting board visible. Here is what to do with it.

Walk it empty

Before boxes hide everything: torch along skirtings and cupboard corners for droppings and dead insects, open the meter box and kitchen cupboards hunting the termite system’s durable notice, check under sinks for the drips that feed everything, and note gaps at pipes and doors while sealing them is a ten-minute job instead of a furniture-moving one. The entry-proofing guide covers the seals worth doing now.

Sort the termite status

If you bought recently, your building-and-pest report is the baseline — how to read it. The durable notice (or its absence) tells you whether a protection system exists and how old it is; the barrier-expiry guide covers what expired-or-unknown means and doesn’t. Either way, settlement is the natural anniversary to anchor the annual inspection habit to.

The baseline treatment

A general pest treatment into an empty or near-empty house — $289, or $339 for larger homes — reaches everything it will ever reach: full skirting access, clear cupboards, an unobstructed roof void. Whatever the previous occupants left behind, population-wise, gets reset before your furniture gives it cover. Renters get the mirror-image version of this logic at the other end of a lease.

Then move in

New-home weeks are chaos, so this is a deliberately short list: walk it, check the notice, treat it empty, book the anniversary inspection. Call 0490 425 521 or request a quote online — licensed technicians, QBCC Licence 15104001, across Brisbane, Logan and Ipswich.