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Say Hello to our Little Friend

November 7, 2009 in home | 2 comments

The sound of scratching on the walls inside your home can be disconcerting and highly distracting. In the quiet hours of the evening, with Paloma asleep and Katie and I reading at our computers, we occasionally hear a scratch, scratch, scratch coming from a nearby wall. There’s an animal in there – but what? And how did it get there in the first place?

The situation has happened 3 or 4 times now since we have lived in the house inside an interior wall between our master bathroom and dining room. This summer, we had a pest exterminator come by our house to assess the situation in the last occurrance of the scratcing. He crawled all over our attic and in our crawlspace underneath the dining room floor, but he could find no evidence of rodents nor could he find any openings in the walls that would enable them to enter the wall. His suggestion: cut open the wall and inspect the situation. He suggested that we put up a temporary barrier to coax the rodent out of the house, instead of escaping to somewhere else inside the house.

As you can probably imagine, we weren’t too thrilled with the option of cutting open the wall, and especially worried about what could possibly be in there? A rat or mouse seemed like the only real possibility given the tight space, but what if it was a squirrel? or a bird? And in the past times where the noises came and went, where did the animal go? Did it die in the wall? Did it escape?

The scratches came again a few weeks ago. We decided this was it, we were going to open up the wall and fix the problem, once and for all. For your pleasure I have included the video chronicle of what we found.

Epilogue

As to whether or not our little friend was actually a rat or a mouse, I’m not exactly sure. I think it was a baby rat because of the disproportion beetween the head and the body, but looking back it is a bit too close to call.

How was the rat getting into the wall? We don’t know. I spent an hour fishing around the attic looking for the entry point. There are some very small cracks that I caulked up, but I don’t feel like I really know how entry was achieved. We did end up taking a picture into the bay, but there was no real clue offered by it.

The Rat Clubhouse

So what happened with the other rats/mice in the past? We found multiple tails and sets of bones in the stud bay, but no other remains. We can also see that the previous owners have opened the wall in an adjacent bay, so this problem has been occurring for years in multiple locations. One disturbing theory on the where the rat remains went offered by Mr. Stadler: those remains were the bait to entice new rats to enter the death chamber. We just hope that by stopping the cycle it won’t happen again.

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“Bullseye”

October 7, 2009 in home, portland | 1 comment

We generally like to report good news here at theshrollys, but last week we couldn’t help but be consumed by a bit of bad news.

The developer next door finally got the plans together to commence with installing new sewer lines, in anticipation of 4 new houses, and the first thing they need to do is to cut down some trees that are in the way of development. I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed a massive fir tree falling, but I don’t think the video does it justice. After the tree bounced on the ground, a ripple coursed through it almost like it was a blade of grass. The whole house shook. We realized later that evening that one of the lights in our kitchen started working again, the wiring probably fixed by the house shaking.

I definitely understand the that encouraging infill helps Portland meet its urban density goals, and I can see the benefits of higher urban densities – it is part of what I already like about Portland. Unfortunately, though, this process has been quite frustrating as it is very clear that our city officials at the Bureau of Development Services are biased towards development, not towards the citizens who actually live in the neighborhood and deal with the development. When you look at the tree preservation code (developers only need to save 35% of the significant trees on-site), with ample mitigation opportunities to reduce that target even further, it is also clear that the city is encouraging development at the expense of the urban tree canopy. It’s a shame, really.

Personally, I think the developers could achieve similar profit levels with less dense building and in doing so actually keep more of the trees on the site. While this might result in just two or three new houses on the site next door, and therefore lower density, it would also have a lower impact on the surrounding neighborhood and maintain much of what drew many of us to this neighborhood in the first place. As it is, they will be cutting down 5 more large trees and then, likely, they will just sell the lots for somebody else to develop. And it is quite possible that the new owners will just buy the land and never develop, which would truly be a shame.

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