In our house in Colorado, sometimes we’d get mice come in, especially in the fall when it started getting cold, and we’d have to trap them. It never seemed like a really big deal. Besides, the occasional mouse in the house gave the cat something to do.
Here in this house, we’ve had mice get underneath the house and die. That can be smelly. It’s a cement slab under the house, so if they just die there, no big deal, we can find them and throw them out. But if they get up into the sub-floor, in among the insulation, wiring, and heating/air conditioning ducts it can be a bigger deal. Over the years we’ve had a couple get up there and die. Unable to locate and remove the little mouse carcass, we have to endure a few days of intense smell in that part of the house while the carcass decomposes. It’s not fun, but it passes.
This last week was something entirely different though. We knew we had something in the floor. We could hear it scrambling and banging around at night for a couple nights in a row. It was enough to wake us up and keep us awake. It sounded big and it sounded like it had a major construction project going on in there. Must be a big rat. Some advised us to put out poison bait, but we didn’t want it to eat poison then crawl back up inside the house and die. We have a bug guy that sprays around our house for bugs and spiders once every three months, but he doesn’t do rodents. We got a good recommendation for a pest control guy that will go after critters other than just bugs and called him. He said for sure, don’t put out poison; what we don’t want to happen surely will, and we’ll be dealing with something dead up under the house. He said to put out some snap-traps and catch it. He would come by and have a look as soon as he could in a couple days.
We found the entry point underneath the air-conditioning ductwork and put out a big rat snap-trap baited with peanut butter. The next morning, the peanut butter was gone and the trap had been triggered, but no varmint. That night however, there was no sound in our floor, so we figured at least we scared it away. Maybe it wouldn’t come back. The next night it started to stink from underneath the bathroom, next to the bedroom at the back of the house. Uh oh. Maybe that big trap wounded him and we got what we didn’t want; a dead rodent hidden in the underbelly of our house. By the next morning the whole back of the house smelled so bad it was uninhabitable. This was not some little dead mouse starting to smell. We opened up all the windows in the back of the house, closed off the doors to it, and stayed in the front. We needed our pest guy. That night we slept on the couch and recliner. By morning, the front of the house was uninhabitable as well. Now we were desperate. We moved into the bus.
The pest guy came on Friday, and boy did we get the right guy for the job. Most people, even people who are supposed to want to do this sort of thing, don’t want to. This guy, he takes great pride in his work. It was like hiring GhostBusters. He’ll tackle anything, but he too was overwhelmed by the smell. He geared up to go under the house and find this thing. He had on an entire white haz-mat suit with a hood and a respirator. He located an opening in the subfloor at the rear of the house, cut into it, dug around, and pulled out our problem. He emerged from under the house gagging and holding a fifteen pound possum that had got stuck and died up there! OMG was that thing awful, and it had only just begun. As bad as this was, it was only going to get so much worse before it ever got any better.
He found the carcass and removed it on Friday. We left everything open back there to air out. He said he’ll come back Monday or Tuesday to spray bleach and finish the clean-up, then put everything back together. He says he can seal off any entry points so nothing else can get up in there. We shouldn’t have to do this again.
Possums. Who knew a giant possum could get in a little hole like that and jam itself up under the flooring? Who knew a possum could smell that bad?
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