and The Housekeeper Screamed

I'm not sure what woke me up this morning but I knew something wasn't right. (So likely her screams woke me up but I didn't hear it I just got up. So, I got up and the housekeeper was kind of messed up and shaking. I asked her what was wrong and she said she found a dead rat. (And she can't deal with any dead animals at all I found out). But this is not a problem for me, even dead people I likely could deal with as long as it is not a relative or friend that is dead.

So, I hugged her and told her she was okay and I grabbed a plastic zip lock bag and put it on like one does a doggy bag to pick up excrement from your pet while walking outside. I picked the dead rat up by the tail and took it outside and put it in the trash. However, when I asked the housekeeper about this she showed me the rest of the stuff she found which was basically a rats nest that it was building on top of a heating duct.

What happened in a short story is that we had a new central heating system put in for the whole house so we didn't have a heater in the house for about a week. However, the weather was okay to do this at that time a few weeks ago because it wasn't getting very cold at night and if you close the windows in time (before it gets dark) the house stayed around 60 to 65 degrees which is okay at night inside.

However, when they were done putting in the new ducting and heating system they had ripped out the floor in a hallway closet on the way to the garage from the kitchen and this was all still open because a general contractor had been hired and was supposed to close all this up last week. But now, my housekeeper was freaked out by finding first a rats nest on top of an open duct in that area and then finding a dead rats in that nest and then screamed. She was so messed up that she actually thought it was a mouse and not a rat.

We live near the forest and so Brown wood rats are always trying to move under our house (since it is pier block construction) during the winter time. So, one of the reasons we were changing to a better heating system as they had eaten through some of the old ducting to stay warm in the winter and we didn't like that. So, here we are in an affluent area and literally everyone is having to deal with this because of the beautiful forest we all live in near the ocean. So, it's an ongoing problem because rats can chew through wood, screening, and sometimes if they are persistent they will even chew through cement block if that is what they want to do bad enough.

ON top of this if you have dogs the rats are living on the dogs feces if any is in the back yard. They do this especially in the winter when food is scarce elsewhere.

So, I realized I needed to fix this problem since the General contractor hadn't come through for us because this was getting kind of dangerous to have the family exposed in this way. So, I decided to use some scrap 1/2 inch plywood to seal all this up myself.

5 hours later:

I was pretty tired of shaping with my hand electric jig saw pieces of plywood to fit around about 15 inch ducting to seal the rats permanently under the house away from us. Because we can't expect our housekeeper to deal with all this just because a contractor didn't come and fix this when he was supposed to.

So, I did a pretty good job with the scraps from a project I helped make with my daughter when she was in grade school that I had kept in our garage. So, at least the floor is done now.

Note: When you are using any kind of electrical saw you need to be rested enough to not cut your fingers off by accident or without nicking yourself. So, if I get really tired building something I won't use a saw unless I have my full attention. Also, you don't want to be drinking alcohol when you are using an electric saw either. I have known several people in my life to have lost one or more fingers to an electric saw of one kind or another. So, be careful when you saw anything and make sure you are in a really focused mindset before you embark on doing something like this.

My father, Grandfather, and my uncle were all Electrical Contractors and so I was taught to think this way by the time I was 10 years old. (They all kept all their fingers and I have too by the way).