Flat or House: the Only Question the Price Turns On
£190 covers a flat and £220 covers a house, and nothing else in the booking moves the number. A studio and a four-bedroom flat in a converted terrace are both flats. A ground-floor flat with its own yard is still a flat. A whole terraced, semi-detached or detached house is a house, and its garden, patio, paths and outbuildings belong to that booking, because the colony is usually out there rather than indoors. Two trails in two rooms are not two jobs, and rooms are not counted at all for ants.
Blocks, conversions and shared entrances
Where a trail runs between homes rather than in from a garden, the property being treated may not be the property holding the nest. In a purpose-built block the warm service voids and riser cupboards that carry pipes between floors are the road; in a house converted into flats it is more often the boxed-in run behind a kitchen. If neighbours are seeing the same ants, say so when you book: each flat is priced as a flat and the whole of it is confirmed with you first. It is worth telling the managing agent too, since communal areas are theirs rather than any single leaseholder's.
Garden Ants and Pharaoh Ants Are Two Different Jobs
The black garden ant lies behind almost every summer trail: dark, a few millimetres long, entering at floor level from a nest under a patio, a path, a front step or a planter, and gone again by autumn. The Pharaoh ant is tiny and pale yellowish-brown, hard to pick out against a worktop, active indoors right through the winter, and nesting inside the fabric of a heated building rather than outside it. It is far less usual in London homes and shows up mainly in large buildings and blocks that stay warm all year.
That distinction matters before anything is bought or sprayed, not after. A product aimed at a garden ant trail can make a Pharaoh ant colony split and spread into rooms that had no ants in them at all, turning one problem into several. Pharaoh ants and garden ants shows how to tell them apart, and it is the page to read first if the ants are pale and the month is January.
What we need you to have noticed
- The size of the ants and whether they are dark or pale
- The month, and whether they have been indoors through the cold weather
- Where the trail enters the room, and where it goes once it is outside
- Whether fine heaps of soil sit at a crack, a paving joint or the base of a wall
- Whether anyone else in the same building has them
- A photograph of the trail, which usually settles the identification on its own
What London Housing Adds to an Ant Job
Garden ants want warm, dry, well-drained ground hard against a building, and London supplies a great deal of it. Paved back yards behind terraces, the joint where a rear extension meets the original house, front paths and steps, balcony planters and the sunny edge of a suburban patio are all good nesting ground. A basement or lower-ground flat meets that ground at its own floor level, which is why the lowest home in a building tends to be the one with the trail. Higher up, a trail has climbed, and what is worth finding is what it climbed.
Flats above shops sit over a different set of warm voids again, where a service duct or an extraction run offers a route that owes nothing to a garden. Ants nesting inside walls explains when a trail that seems to begin nowhere is doing exactly that.
Around the Visit, and Afterwards
Before we come, stop spraying. A trail you can still see is worth more than a clean worktop, because the line itself shows where the colony is working from; warm soapy water is fine for hygiene in the meantime. Clear the floor along the skirting the ants run beside, and put the pet bowl and any open sweet food out of reach.
Afterwards, ants may remain visible for a while, and how long that goes on depends on the size of the colony and how far it runs. Nobody can honestly put a date on it. Watch whether the traffic is thinning, and if it is not, get back in touch and describe what you are seeing and precisely where. How long ant treatment takes covers what affects the timescale, and why ants come back after DIY treatment explains the pattern most households have already been through by the time they ring.
Where We Work
Ant control runs across all 33 boroughs at the same two prices. Ant Control Brent is the borough-level page, with the individual Brent areas beneath it, and Pest Control Brent lists every service there. For the practical how-to - following the trail home, dealing with the colony rather than the workers, and the mistakes worth avoiding - read our London ant advice. If the insects on the kitchen floor at night are larger, flatter and scatter when the light goes on, it is cockroach control you need, and one fixed opening in a roofline used by insects all summer is a wasp nest.
