On the Friday night, as part of my preparations for the next day, I went to load a few WeatherTex planks to use on the side wall.

I was dismayed to see termite mud and had a panic that my $4000 pile of cladding had been eaten out.

Closer examination showed that the termites were following two piece of untreated pine amoungst all the gluts.

In most cases they had merely "kissed" the WeatherTex and left behind a lot of mud.

Instead of going to site the next day I spent the entire weekend relocating the pile and cleaning the mud off the affected lengths.

About 95 % of the pile was pristine clean.

Of the remaining 5% the mud cleaned off using a high pressure washer.

Of these, about 8 pieces had been attacked in a half hearted way, and mainly, from appearances, for access reasons.

This makes me confident that cladding is almost white ant proof.

Where they were attacked the damage was at isolated points sitting over the pine gluts, not the entire length.

I have really lost nothing at all, as these slightly damaged pieces will be cut up for those places just needing a short piece to complete a run.

I also took the time to clean marks off about 20 pieces - these were sitting on the top surface of the pile and picked up a few marks from traffic.

I scrubbed these with sugar soap solution and rinsed them down with the high pressure washer.

This means once the wall of cladding is installed I can go straight on to painting it without needing to wash it down - it will be a very large area (12.6 metres by 2.8 metres) - so would be a lot of work to clean in situ.