Warning, this post contains graphic descriptions of me killing bloody rats, rat poop, and how I f**king hate rats!!
Ok, so when we first purchased the house we knew that there was a lot of remodeling we had to do and the master bath always had this funny small to it. But I just attributed the odor to the fact that the previous owners were smelly. As we started the first remodel, when I was in the attic, I noticed a lot of insulation kinda torn off and scattered throughout the attic space. I didn’t think much of it, it’s an attic. Well, one night about two weeks ago I was getting ready for bed and I heard what sounded like a hundred pound person in my attic above the master bath. At first I thought WTF is that, someone’s in my attic. I rushed to get a flash light, went up the attic stairs and with my flash light began searching for this hundred pound man.
What I saw next totally blew me away. Off in the distance in the far reaches of my attic’s universe I saw two little reflective beads staring back at me. Then suddenly they began to move quickly to the right, and that’s when I saw it, a tail, RAT! FUCKING RAT! And this mother was not small either, it had to have been at least 6 inches long without the TAIL!!
Well, I know enough that if you have one rat you have many. How the hell do I get rid of these suckers? The next day I called ABC Lawn and Pest control to have them come over and see how much it would cost to get rid of them der varmint!! They wanted 650.00 to dispose of the rats and contain my house! Yikes, that’s a lot of money for some little furry varmint! So, I had him show me where he thought they were coming in from and then decided “Well, hell I can do this myself” and I did.
I sealed off all the holes in my roof and started laying out traps. On a suggestion from one of my employees I used bananas on the traps. Man did those work great. On the first night I caught that 6 incher i had originally seen and one of its babies. “OOOH, this is going to be cool”, I thought. Sometimes the spring would get’em on the shoulder, in the back and one time it got the rat square on the head, eyes popped out and everything!! Surprising to me was I heard that sometimes those spring traps cause blood to spray everywhere, well that’s just not true. They work great!!
Ok now, fast forward two weeks, I’m not catching rats anymore. In total I killed about 5 rats but now, when I set out traps they don’t get sprung. So, now I feel the rats are out and can’t get back in. So, obviously I begin to rip up the bathroom. Yesterday, before the AC people came I took up the flooring in the attic. This is where things get gross. To my utter shock, when I pulled the flooring up I noticed that the rats had created a complex network of tunnels in the insulation between the ceiling joist and the flooring in the attic. As I started to inspect the insulation further I was hit with an overwhelming smell of ammonia. What’s that smell, cat piss? Oh no, that’s right, these weren’t tunnels, it was their lavatory. As I pulled on the tops of the insulation that lay in between the ceiling joists I discover half of the insulation was gone and in its place was rat piss and poo!!!
I’m not talking about just a few pieces, the entire length of the insulation, like 3 feet was filled with rat poo and piss. I pulled up another piece, BAM! The same thing.. wow, I had never before in my life seen such a thing. Three rows of insulation completely destroyed due to rat infestation!! Needless to say I removed those pieces of insulation and once the AC is done I’m putting in new insulation and re-flooring the attic.
UPDATE: last night as L and I were watching a movie, we don’t have TV, we heard something scurry across the attic or roof, we couldn’t tell… maybe they’re back!?
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