A good home foundation keeps your house stable and prevents severe damage that could otherwise affect its structure. Unfortunately, a vast array of termite species may invade your home's foundation and cause disruptive damage to the support wood. The following symptoms will help you gauge if and when termites have invaded your home's foundation and caused damage to its structure.

Mud Tunnels Outside Your Home

Termites invade a home's foundation by tunneling into the mud to find weak spots where they can enter. The small size of a termite means that they can fit into tiny cracks in your home's exterior. Pay attention to the outside of your home to locate these mud tunnels and trace them to your house.

If you find mud tunnels around your home, you may want to take steps to ensure that termites can't escape your home. These steps include exclusion techniques - which requires you to seal up any cracks where termites can invade - and improving the slope around the base of your home to keep new termites out.

Try to trap the termites in this way to make it impossible for them to escape when you call an exterminator. Otherwise, many of the termites may escape when they apply the pesticide and could invade your home to damage your foundation again after the chemical spray has dissipated and disappeared.

Dying Plants in Your Home

Termites don't just eat wood when they invade a home but any item that has high levels of fibers. For example, termites may attack your home's plants, particularly the leaves, to get nutrients. In desperate situations, termites may also attack books and other paper items in your home.

If you spot this type of damage, termites have probably already spread heavily through your home. And since many species of termites invade homes through the basement or near the foundation, they have likely made a nest near your foundation wood and are chewing away at it.

Wood Shavings Near Your Foundation

If you notice signs of termites in or around your home, check out your foundation. Look for holes in the wood that go beyond minor weathering damage. Wood shavings on the floor should indicate where termites have invaded your timber or where they may have made a home in the wood.

While looking for wood shavings, you should also look for termite fecal matter, wings, shed skins, and anything else that may pinpoint their location. Most termite species will make nests in hard-to-find areas, so you're going to have to use these signs to find the possible location of their nest near your foundation.

Shifting Doors, Walls, and Windows

Lastly, you need to check your home for any symptoms of foundation damage. Typically, even a small termite invasion will cause some problems in your home. For example, check to see how well your doors close. If any of your doors struggle to shut correctly or stay closed, foundation damage may have caused your home to shift.

Foundation shifts typically cause other types of damage to your home, as well, such as cracked walls and windows. Pay attention to where these cracks occur to gauge the depth of the foundation damage. For example, damage on the first floor may indicate minor shifting but problems on the second or even third floors of a home indicate more problematic shifts in your home's foundation.

Help is Available

If you are worried about termite damage to your foundation and aren't sure where to turn, please don't hesitate to contact us at Bonilla Foundation Repair to get the help that you need. Our professionals will inspect your foundation and repair any damage that termites may have caused.