I write this to the tune of three men up in our attic, ripping up insulation. Out of all the surprises this house has come with, my least favorite has been…rats.
We were warned moving to an agricultural town, we’d be dealing with rodents. Our home is in a “cookie cutter” neighborhood, rather far from the farms, so we honestly didn’t think it would be that big of a deal. The previous owner also had a rodent exclusion done a few years ago that we thought was up to snuff… well, we thought wrong.
When we were out in Colorado, we got a text from our pet sitter. We were at a late lunch with my brother on a Saturday only to hear she found a dead rat in our pool. We were horrified for a few different reasons, mainly, there was a dead rat in our pool. We were also in another state, wouldn’t be home for a few days and this was in the middle of a heat wave with temperatures rising over 100 degrees each day. We didn’t want this pest to be sous vided in our pool, especially over the weekend. Our pet sitter is 16-years-old, a synchronized swimmer (cause that’s a sport out here in California), and about 80 pounds. She loves our cats dearly but asking her to remove the rat from our pool was a bit much of an ask.
We made a few calls including to animal control of the County to which the officer who responded to our call was a total dick. I guess that’s par for the course for wannabe cops..
“We don’t deal with deceased rats.”
“Just put it in a garbage back and throw it in your garbage bin.”
“Oh you’re out of town? Then how’d you hear about it? Have your pet sitter do it.”
His words, not mine. Like I said, a total dick.
We contacted a few pest control companies who only remove dead rodents if you have a monthly service with them. They don’t do one time calls. Not even if you pinky promise you’ll start a monthly service with them as soon as you’re back.
So we contacted Flanners, our real-estate agent. He was out of town and on his super-secret burner phone but managed to contact one of the other agents at his office, we will call her Claire.
Claire texted us saying she would handle it. Her cats brought her rats all the time, so she was used to disposing of them. The next day, we got a message from our pet sitter that there was ANOTHER rat in the pool. This one was grey, the previous one was black and white. Turns out, it was the same rat…just decomposing…in our pool. Claire came, removed the rat, we called our pool guy to throw a little extra chlorine in there and the rest seemed like history.
We dropped off a bottle of wine at Claire’s house to thank her for this hopefully one time problem. And we also thought it was bad ass that we didn’t need no man, we just needed a cat lady.
After how tumultuous our move with Eileen was, part of me wondered if she threw a rat in our pool. But we didn’t really have anything else happen and I think I’ve just been listening to too many true crime podcasts. Working theory is, it was a very hot time of the year, and the rat was just looking for something to drink and Darwin’s rules applied and he drowned.
Eileen did leave some of her rat traps up on the fence so I called a few companies just to see how much monthly service would be. This wasn’t a problem we wanted to have.
The company she used gave me a quote right away without seeing the property, but a more local company came out to do an inspection. Unfortunately per his inspection and to our surprise we had an active rat problem. The rodent exclusion Eileen had done a few years ago was half assed. We had the exterior of the house painted and we could see urine marks and oil marks from the rats entering through our stucco. We were not surprised that Eileen cheaped out on the rodent exclusion and that it was done “DIY” as our now pest control company stated.
Besides the pool incident, we hadn’t heard or seen anything. Granted it’s been hot, and supposedly rats have a similar temperature preference to humans, so they won’t go in the attic if it’s 120 degrees and we run our whole house fan and a sound machine at night. But now that it’s cooling off, they are looking for a nice warm place to stay for the winter. Rats also love fruit trees, and we are surrounded by them. Apricots, figs, grapes, lemons, oranges, persimmons to name a few. Having all this fresh produce was the coolest part of living in California…until now.
Our pest inspector showed us pictures of what our attic looked like. It didn’t take much for Mrs Dr Greys Anatomy and I to whip out our check book and tell him to take all our money. Again, this was not a problem we wanted to have period. But especially as we look to start a family. Having literal shit in your attic impacts air quality and we are also not about to bring back the bubonic plaque. Going through one pandemic was enough.
Turns out a rodent exclusion is very expensive. I guess I can’t blame them. I don’t get paid enough to deal with human rats in the corporate world…dealing with actual rats…God doesn’t even have enough money to pay me to do that. So we signed our largest check for this house to date. Thankfully Mrs Dr Greys Anatomy didn’t want to DIY this one herself. I don’t know if our marriage would have survived her youtubing her way through rodent exclusions. At this point we were both very happy to need a man and hire a man.
What this rodent exclusion has entailed: resetting traps in the attic and in our yard. They come by weekly to check the traps. We have also had to seal up any entry points on the roof, and now, they are vacuuming up our insulation and rat droppings in the attic and will replace it with a more rodent proof insulation after spraying a natural disinfectant.
Yesterday when they came to seal up the entry points in the roof, they did find a rat in the attic. I was disgusted but also relieved to know we didn’t get swindled. This is unfortunately an active problem. The rat also wasn’t as large as I was envisioning. I was expecting these NYC sized monsters that would probably eat our cats alive. But it was maybe the size of a large yam.
Speaking of the cats, yes, they’ve been completely worthless during this time. Bernie will occasionally meow at night, and I wonder if it’s because he hears or smells them. Boba is too naïve and innocent to know that such horrors exist in the world. That, and she’s still SO little, I’m not sure she’d be much help. These two are definitely our shopping buddies, not our hunting buddies.
That’s all for now. Judging by our bank account, a book deal would be pretty nice right about now…
