A technician who walks the outside of a house before opening the front door is not counting palms.

Two days after the last hard rain moved through, you found a spider tucked into the corner of the garage door track that wasn't there before the storm.

You open the louvered door to the AC closet to change a filter or check the breaker, and roaches scatter across the floor, up the side of the air handler, or behind the water heater.

A canal bank holds water at one edge and packed earth at the other, and that boundary is where a Norway rat's day starts, well before any nearby house comes into the picture.

You open a cabinet door to grab a box of pasta, and something skitters back into the dark corner behind the mixing bowls.

The garage gets treated like the inside of the house: swept on a good week, maybe reorganized once a year, the trash cans wheeled through it twice a week.

Ask how many attics a house has, and the answer is usually one. Under an articulated estate roofline, it is often several, and that is a difference in kind rather than a difference in size.

Is there a roach season in South Florida, or is that an idea that just doesn't apply down here?

Ask a handful of South Florida homeowners when they notice the most spiderwebs and most will point to roughly the same stretch of the calendar: the lanai screen that had one small web in June somehow has four by September, orb weavers seem to double in size overnight, and a corner of the garage nobody visits collects a new egg sac before you've dealt with the last one.

Most homeowners assume the first sign of a roach problem is a roach. It rarely is.

A lanai screen that carried three or four spiderwebs before a storm can look completely bare the next morning, then have new strands strung across the same corners within days.

You are holding two scopes of work for rodent proofing on the same house, both from licensed companies, both using the same word.

If your last address was a newer development with young trees and a fresh sod yard, and you've since moved into an established Coral Springs or Delray Beach neighborhood, you've probably noticed something odd: there are just more webs.

A rat traveling the same joist or roofline gap night after night is not moving carelessly.

You paid for a spider treatment a few weeks ago. The porch corner by the front light got sprayed, the webs came down, and for a handful of days the space looked clean.

Before you reach for a spray can or call anyone, look at the dropping itself.

Two calls came in the same week, both for scratching in the attic after dark.

Walk your property at dusk with a flashlight, and you'll likely find the same three or four spots holding a web, week after week: a corner of the eave under the porch light, a gap at the top of a window screen, the hedge line along the side yard.

Your technician packed up around noon. By three, the sky over your yard has gone that flat gray color, wind kicking up ahead of the first drops, and you're standing at the window watching it come down harder by the minute.

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