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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

For years I had a plague of brown spiders on my deck. I finally called an exterminator.

He laughed, and said I didn't have a plague of spiders. I had a plague of carpenter ants in the deck, and the spiders were there to eat the ants. I pushed a screwdriver into one of the support beams, which looked perfectly fine. To my horror the screwdriver went all the way through the beam! The carpenter ants had completely eaten away the interior, it was just a painted shell. I had no idea why it had not collapsed.

So came the job of sawing off the old deck to replace it. Instead of falling down into a pile of lumber, it fell down into a pile of dust. It was loaded into a truck with a shovel.

Years later, when I decided to build a custom house, it had a concrete deck with an iron railing.

Moral: if you've got a lot of spiders, they're there for a reason. The real problem is hidden.

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Few years back during spring I noticed soft parts of my deck railing getting chewed up by squirrels. I was puzzled as the squirrels never touched the deck prior to this. I figured the soft wood was weathered as the deck was old and the squirrels were enjoying chewing it or it was a form of oral care.

Last spring I had a handyman come by to clean up the yard and paint the fences and told him about the railings. He poked around them and stuck a screwdriver into a soft spot and out came a bunch of carpenter ants. He laughed and said the squirrels weren't ripping up my deck but looking for food. I stupidly assumed squirrels were herbivores when they are in fact omnivorous.

They stopped allowing arsenic (Chromated Copper Arsenate) in pressure treated lumber in 2003 in the US. The replacement is not nearly as resistant to rot and pests, and the quality of the lumber used has also decreased in the decades since. There are lots of bandaids in the construction industry like putting tape along the tops of the joists to reduce the amount of water that gets in, but it looks like the industry is probably going to move to metal framing and plastic-based products for construction designed to last 10 years or more. Plastic based decking (eg Trex) has already taken over everything except the low end.

In think the reason you can’t use metal is because building code is significantly more lenient for wood structures. As soon as you bring metal into the mix you get stuck with more complicated engineering and permits

It's coming. There's plenty of engineering experience framing with metal, Light Gauge Steel (LGS) framing has been around for decades. This is just adding a new use case.

https://fortressbp.com/framing

Yeah I get that steel is a better material in many cases but building code is going to be slow to catch up, or wood simply has a grandfather clause that makes things simpler

Too bad I don't like the feel of plastic on by bear feet or the look of it. Heart redwood is still available but pretty pricey.

Trex also has the unfortunate long term habit of sagging as if it’s getting softer, which looks terrible and causes water to collect on the cupped surfaces.

And those composites also get hot as HELL in the summer sun.

Cumaru/Ipe is also an option, although also expensive and finding a sustainable source is challenging.

> rot and pests

Most wood frame construction has very poor consideration of keeping it dry. I bought the book "Common Sense Pest Control"

https://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Pest-Control-Least-Toxic...

and incorporated many of its solutions into the house I had built. It has paid off handsomely, the house has needed very little maintenance, there's no rot, and I haven't had much trouble with pests. The increased construction cost was very, very little.

For example, destructive insects like to get in cracks in the concrete foundation, and move upwards into the wooden sill plate, then up into the walls of the house. The usual construction technique is to put a piece of plastic between the sill and the foundation, if they put anything at all. I had a sheet of stainless steel put there instead.

(Also, concrete absorbs water like a sponge. Concrete in contact with wood will rot the wood over time.)

It's why I try not to kill spiders I find in my home and just throw them outside. They're nature's exterminators. Though it's easy for me since in my country we don't have such dangerous spiders.

House centipedes as well, while they look creepy as hell they’re discreet and efficient bug hunters. Including silverfishes, which are bad and should feel bad.

Silverfish are beautiful! In my floorboards, or my bookcase, they are not a good sign... but they're so cute! And so ancient - primeval, even.

Providing they stick to the back yard I can appreciate them.

Silverfishes eat books. There can be no peace between my house and theirs, it’s a blood feud.

I love geckos for this reason. super efficient at keeping the place bug free and also cute

And their wall walking abilities are amazing to watch!

Jumping spiders are my best friends, I’d raise them if I could keep anything alive. As-is, I just try not to bother them when one takes up residence in a corner of a room.

If you like jumping spiders you should read this great Scifi book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)

Portia spiders are used to pre-populate a terraformed planet (among a few other species like ants) before humans arrive but [minor spoiler] they eventually take over the entire planet and develop an advanced society. Which causes an interesting conflict when a lost group of humans do arrive much later than planned via spaceship.

The sequel book takes the same concept but uses an octopus takeover of a water planet.

Funny, was thinking the same thing. The audible version is great. Book 1 is pretty good. If you want, stop it there and there won’t be too much you are missing. I’ve listened to the three that are out, this is my preference but would say I enjoyed all 3 but not a lot of value added after the first one.

Oh I didn't know there was a 3rd one. But yeah the 2nd one had some slow wading moments, basically the obligation to make it have a beginning/middle/end type story under insane constraints while keeping it plausible. But it's worth the price of admission to nerd out on some earth species taking over some local region of space in another solar system.

The noise though. A long time ago I stayed in an old stone building in the south of France. There were dozens of these things on each wall. They'd crawl about at night and drive me insane. The pitter patter of a thousand tiny feet...

As long as they're discreet, they have my tentative permission to go about their business. But I will provide selection pressure towards discretion if I happen to be startled by their appearance.

Spiders are slightly higher class citizens, and more likely to be safely captured and released outdoors... but are ultimately subject to the same regime, at least between my walls.

Whenever I meet a new spider in my home I have 2 rules: 1. Don’t be dangerous to my family 2. Do not enter my bedroom. If these rules are violated I’ll kindly escort them out.

https://old.reddit.com/r/spiderbro/

Common black ants as well. If one of them finds a single termite larvae they will leave a pheromone trail and shortly thereafter an army will devour that larvae and they will break up into teams and scout all the walls and floors for more of them.

To keep them out of the house interior I find their nest and give them food and water.

I also had a major problem with yellowjackets. Clouds of them! That turned out to be caused by cedar shingles, as those were ideal nesting places for the yellowjackets. The roof was getting old anyway, and so I had it replaced with asphalt shingles. No more yellowjackets.

Damp wood is pretty edible to ask the creepy crawlies. Needs to be kept dry.

Hard to do if thats a deck. You can apply paint, sealant, and other things to prolong it but you have to reapply it every once in a while...forget for too long and then you have a discolored deck and will eventually start rotting.

I was waiting for a different punchline:

Moral: if you've got a lot of spiders, use concrete!

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