The Joys Of Home Ownership

or, I Smell A Rat

by Frank Brown, 29-nov-01

At first I thought it was a mouse, but in fact a rat was cohabiting with Suzan and me. It liked rice. It pooped where it pleased. When I opened the potholder drawer it jumped out, making me cry 'eek!'.

My first attempt at removal was purchasing a live trap, an aluminum elongated box with a spring-loaded door which shut when a panel was stepped on. The rat ignored it. We tried leaving a trail of crumbs leading up to and inside the trap. The next morning all the crumbs leading to the trap were gone, but those inside the trap were untouched.

Suppressing my humane impulses, next I set seven old-fashioned, break-his-little-neck Victor mousetraps. They were ignored. We tried cheese, peanut butter, apples. This rat was not fooled. I escalated to rat traps (bigger) but this rat steadfastly ignored the traps, big and small, humane or not.

Finally in desperation we set out rat poison. No dead critter appeared. In fact he started gnawing on the door to the upstairs and the floor around the heating vent in room 5.

Suzan and I drove south to Underwood WA to spend Thanksgiving with our friends Christopher and Sherri at Highland Farm. Two days later when we returned the house stank to high heaven of something dead. Turns out the little guy had expired in a heating duct, not visible but intensely olfactory. I turned off the heater, opened windows, and made some phone calls.

Cascade Pest Control sent out a guy (Brian Greer) who removed several heating grates, looked around with a flashlight and mirror, said "yup, you've got a dead rat in there all right" and charged me $95.00. His invoice states "checked heat ducts and void spaces." He did not remove the rat and our house stank as bad as before he came.

I booked us a room in the Thunderbird Motel on Aurora, and scheduled Ballard Power Vac to clean our furnace ducts; they were booked until three days hence. The third day was today. James drove up in his truck, hooked up a 10-inch flexible tube to our furnace, and turned on the giant sucking sound. Two and a half hours later all of our ducts had been vipered with compressed air, I signed a check for $232.83, cranked up the heater and THE SMELL WAS GONE (mostly).

So to put it bluntly, the bad guy is Cascade Pest Control, they charged me almost $100 for nothing, and the good guy is Ballard Power Vac, they fixed the problem and did a very thorough job cleaning our furnace and ducts.