Rats (Again): The Joys of Home Ownership

[cjsmith]

The guy came by to look at the rat holes to seal. He crawled in the attic from the garage access point [note: this couldn't be done until now because we had no ladder tall enough] and found the traps full and a nest of 8 live rats (6-8" long) nearby. He called up the Pest Control people and told them to get out here on the double.

He found at least 18 grates on the outside of the house that the rats are using for entry, plus a whole bunch of other problems. Rob says rat fur is stuck in the holes and dust is on the floor where the rats have enlarged the holes in the stucco. Our guy was kind of stunned - said he'd never seen a house with so many access passages. O joy O rapture!

Another problem is how all the trees and bushes have grown next to the house. That makes it easy for the rats to jump on the roof and crawl along the gutters.

So our guy is coming by tomorrow to seal the holes, and will recommend a tree trimmer to deal with the shrubs and the trees.

In an unrelated note, the back fence is sagging and wobbly, and may be about to fall over. O rapture! (The landscaping done by the neighbors behind us might have weakened its support by lowering the dirt level a bit, but to be fair the fence is old and was on its last legs anyway.) Maybe the back neighbor will be willing to split the cost of a new fence with us.

Comments

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

Well...if you can't get rid of the rats you can always rename your house the Congress. Hopefully you can evict all of your uninvited guests easily. How old is your house?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I sure hope so, thanks! I don't remember offhand how old the place is; my brain wants to say forty years, but that seems very young considering how many roofs (rooves?) it had. (We had to tear all of them off a couple years ago to put the new one on.) Can't be much more than sixty years old, though; my area was almost uninhabited back then.

Re:

[tsjafo.livejournal.com]

It sounds like a wonderful old house! I live in a new cracker box, designed as a first home for a young family (to meet the needs of the kids at the Army base here) its not really big enough for the four of us. Both of my children are grown and will be moving away all too soon *sigh* and the house will be just about the right size for the two of us for awhile. Then again, I'm just happy to have a home.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ours was designed that way at first. Then some incompetent people turned the back porch into a bonus room. Later, some slightly-more-thorough people added a partial second story. Neither of these were done all that well in terms of heating, electricity, or attic/crawlspace access... can't imagine how they passed inspection, but maybe code was more lenient back then.

Then again, like you, I'm just happy to have a home!