^^Yup, even in urban areas. Just saying… There is a reason my city has a roller derby team called Rat City Rollergirls. 
We have seen rats outside trying to get into our house. The prior tenant did let at least one rat into our house and it gnawed a hose of the dishwasher and one on the washing machine for hefty repair bills for us. 
I know rats can be an issue–they do creep me out.
Rats eat our tomatoes in the garden,so we trap them as humanely as possible. Joys of urban gardening not.
CB, since the rat droppings you saw appeared old and the couple has pest control ‘maintenance’, I’m hoping that there are no rats currently and that everything is from before the pest control starting doing their thing. That would make things easier.
We had never had rodents. I had an energy audit where a guy went in our attic area (crawl space) and said he saw what appeared to be current droppings from one rat. Had pest control people come out and we had a trap for weeks with no more activity/no rat caught. In the meantime we identified two possible points of entry and sealed them up. That must have occurred when the critter was out of our house. Finally removed the trap. No more droppings and no more rodent. Hopefully all the rodents in CB’s current house-in-progress are gone too.
When we lived in the woods in MA we had a horrible problem with field mice. Not only would they get into to house they would get into the cars in the driveway! DH’s didn’t drive his Jeep for few days in the winter when he had time off and mice built a nest in the engine, when he drove it to work it caught fire and destroyed the car. I also found a mouse in my mini van- ran across my feet while driving on the Mass turnpike! Thankfully no mice since we’ve been in TX!
Yikes!!!
I had a mouse smolder on my car manifold. In the garage. Filled garage with smoke. I thought the car was going to explode. It didn’t…but it took several volunteer fire departments responding to deal with it.
I was lucky, they told me…because it could have ignited!
Thank goodness I insisted we tear off the whole ceiling on the family room addition, which is a flat roof configuration and there is no attic to get into and try to inspect. Two skeletal dead rats fell down among all the mess. We have identified their trail between the original house attic and into the flat roof area. Now we just have to get them eradicated out of the original house attic. Believe me… no live rats up there right now because of the major noise of the demolition.
Good move, CB. Rats will be baaaaaack. As soon as the noise is gone, unless their access to the space is eliminated. You are a saint.
Today I have to go up to Miramar area and rent a big stakebed truck for hauling. So far we have filled the living room to the ceiling with demolition and old appliances. Our solution is to rent this truck for about $110 and make about 2 trips of trash and one trip to haul off appliances to special recycling place.
That mouse in the minivan reminds me of that State Farm commercial with the hamster.
Here is an interesting comparison of cost for those of you that might venture into a large demolition…
Dumpster Rental = $550
Labor to fill dumpster = about $500
Stakebed Truck Rental = $135 + about $25 gas and mileage
Labor to fill truck = same $500
Labor to drive truck to dump two times = $100
So, we just learned that it costs about $250 less to do it ourselves with the fancy truck. But, and this is a big but, if you have a dumpster you have the luxury of keeping it for about a week and you can just fill it as you go. You don’t have to touch everything twice. Tear it out and put into living room and then pick it up out of living room and load it into truck.
We got very lucky with the pest inspection. The rodents have only made it into the flat roof area of the house over the family room and a small portion of the kitchen roof. All of these areas have the ceilings torn down now. The company identified every small access point up on the roof and that is the priority today. Close up every small opening.
We also set some traps above the master bedroom hallway just to see if any rodents are accessing that portion of the house.
The entire house has now been vacuumed in walls, ceilings and floors and finishing up with scrubbing every piece of wood affected with bleach.
I have loaded more photos of the demo
Yesterday we discovered two more issues with the house. The little addition off the kitchen is just horrible. I knew this going in and I had already explained to the homeowners that we will have to rebuild the whole thing. Yesterday we tore up the floor and discovered how critters could be getting into the crawlspace. The bottom of the addition was covered with plastic lattice. Whoever built the thing left a giant hole in the original house wall with wide open access to anything crawling through the lattice. A basic freeway for anything to enter.
We can see the reason prior owner left it wide open. They installed some low quality plumbing pipes, connected to the main cast iron sewer line, coming out from the house into the addition for laundry. The vent from the sewer line went up into the attic but never was properly installed to vent out of the roof. Sewer gasses were filling this house and it became really obvious and smelly when we tore off the ceiling in the addition and family room. We have got to get that all pulled out and capped off before we can close up the exit hole.
Never a dull moment!!
OMG… Ewwww!!!
Ewww is right. The house just stinks right now. Homeowners couldn’t understand why there was newspaper shoved down the pipe. Well, now they know
Wow! Never a dull moment! They sure are lucky you guys have their interests at heart!
OMG! That is crazy!
It is amazing what you always find in the houses you are working on!
cb, you’re going to spend all their money on things that don’t show, and they’re not going to be happy about that.