Regrettably, everyday life has really stolen both time and motivation to write blog posts recently. (When you're spending 8 hours a day in front of the computer, spending more time in front of the computer to write a blog post isn't the first thing to spring to mind as an enjoyable or profitable use of free time.)
What is there to update you on? Well, there's Rat Gate.
Rat Gate has been going on since mid January, but we have been reluctant to report on it to anyone but our nearest and dearest until we could be sure that the whole saga was over. We are fairly certain now that we have won the battle, so here is the story with all the gory details.
Mid-January (probably about a week after Sheila, Stuart's Mum, had left us to return home after her Christmas visit), we started to notice strange bits of grit and dust on the floor in the apartment. At first, we didn't think too much of it as these houses tend to shed dust and grit and all sorts, and it's not unusual for insects to start to burrow in wood/mortar and create dust either. But every time we swept up, the dust reappeared. And, to cut a long story short, after having put our wildlife camera in the apartment, we identified the issue: a rodent (ok, cut to the chase, it was a rat) was climbing across a small section of the wall and knocking dust and mortar off it.
Now, this is not the first time we have had issues with, er, "wildlife" in the apartment. We had the rather adorable but pesky pair of edible dormice that appeared when our friends Paul and Marie were staying in the apartment (and who named their companions Colin and Carol), and on other fleeting occasions we were aware of rats having visited (but thankfully not stayed). And, of course, there was the rather more unpleasant situation several years ago prior to having removed the false ceiling in the apartment bedroom when we found them effectively living in the void between the false ceiling and the actual ceiling, and when holes started to be made in the floor above (to feed the hot water pipes through when we were having the hot water system installed) they made their way up into what is now our utility room and ran riot in there. Not pleasant memories!
So, back to Rat Gate. We worked out that, although the rat was traversing a section of wall, it was actually only moving from one part of wall cavity to another and not actually entering the rooms themselves. All of the internal walls in the apartment are cavity walls - the house is built into the hillside at the back, and a cavity is necessary to keep moisture out.
We very quickly identified a point of entry into the house: in what we have come to know as the classic style of the previous owners of our house, they had patched up a hole in the stonework (where a waste pipe exited the house) with nothing more than expanding foam. And the rats had chewed through the foam and entered the cavity wall.
Not wanting to have dead/dying rats inside the apartment, we thought we had come up with a clever idea and invented a sort of one-way cat-flap for rats: we placed a piece of tubing into the hole, at the end of which Stuart fashioned a one-way door made from a disc of perspex. The theory was that the rats (by this stage we knew there were more than one) could exit the house, but would not be able to get back in again. The expanding foam was then replaced with more permanent mortar and we were all set.
Except... the rats continued to appear in the apartment and their activity showed no sign of slowing (in theory they can only last a few days without a source of food/water, so the fact that they were still very much active in the apartment suggested they must still be coming and going).
Clearly our master plan (#1) had failed.
Not long after that, we discovered a hole in the stonework at ground level. "Ha!", we thought, and after filling that hole with mortar, we celebrated and waited for the activity in the apartment to cease.
Except it didn't.
Every morning when I went to the apartment (I had my exercise equipment in there for the winter months), I could hear them squeaking, rustling, running around. They had nested in various parts of the walls above the front door of the apartment, above the kitchen window and along the false beams of the kitchen/living area. And every day when I sat at my desk in the office I could hear them running around below me. There even began to be a very unpleasant smell that began to permeate up through the floor into our living room (think cat's litter tray).
Not nice.
We didn't know where to turn - we couldn't see any obvious way in which the beasts were coming and going and we started to panic, thinking it could literally be anywhere and given that the house is built into the hillside at the back, they could be digging down and coming through the back wall, or they could be digging under and coming up under the floor (there is also an under-floor cavity - the floor being built on top of a series of plastic Iglu blocks (if you're interested see https://www.daliform.com/en/iglu-vespaio-aerato/).
Of course the obvious thing would be to er.. exterminate them. And many, many people suggested the various ways in which we could do this. But, for us, the problem was that if we got rid of them without finding out how they had got in, we would never be able to be sure that the same thing wouldn't happen again in the future. Meaning we wouldn't ever be able to host guests in the apartment again, for fear of beasties arriving during their stay or prior to their stay, and, well, it just being very unsanitary.
At the end of his tether, Stuart decided to knock some holes into the various cavity walls in order to peer down and see what was behind them. He also bought two wi-fi video cameras to stick in the holes to see what the rats were getting up to. We found out that the cavity at the back of the apartment is nowhere near as large as we had been led to believe, but little else of any use.
And still they kept coming, And reproducing.
My gut feeling was that they had to be coming from the exposed stonework at the end of the house as they always seemed to appear on camera from the same spot (stage left on top of the bathroom ceiling). But we were still stumped.
And then we found another hole! Whooopppp! Big celebrations. The hole was filled, and we sat and waited. This time we had definitely got them. Gosh it was such a huge relief to have finally sorted this problem out.
But still they kept coming. And reproducing. And a week came and went (by which time without any food or water they would not have survived).
Increasingly, the only "solution" seemed it would be a case of ripping down all of the internal walls (and floor) in the apartment to find the point of entry. After which putting the apartment back together would have been both an enormous job and almost certainly cost prohibitive too. We could wave goodbye to having a guest apartment. We consoled ourselves with the idea that we could use the space for storage, but it wasn't much consolation.
Over the course of the weeks, Stuart had a few phone calls with our friend Steve. Steve lives in Oxfordshire and used to be a pig farmer (he's now a plumber in case anyone in the area is reading this and needs a recommendation!), so wondered if he could try to help, having had lots of experience of dealing with pests on the farm. I'm not certain that anything particularly brand new came of the phone calls, but they were a huge support and boost, and certainly got Stuart thinking about things again and even more convinced that the rats had to be coming in from that stonework on the end wall.
Stuart spent a day breaking up an old concrete box that had been housing the old waste pipes - and found evidence of a rat run and holes that led into the house. He duly filled all of those holes, we celebrated, but once again our celebrations proved to be premature.
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Another avenue of investigation was the section of house beneath the shed. Stuart donned knee pads and squeezed himself into the tight space of the gully that runs beneath the shed, but didn't find any obvious signs of entry. The very next day the camera caught an enormous snake (a type of grass snake) in the same spot as Stuart had been crawling around in - very glad that hadn't been there when he was under there!!
And so it went on, becoming ever more depressing and stressful.
Until one morning, in sheer desperation, I peered at all of the stonework, inch by inch. It wasn't possible that there were any holes we had missed. We'd both been over it all with a fine tooth comb. Stuart had even taken Steve on a virtual video tour of the perimeter of the house.
I did find a hole, but it was tiny. Very unpromising looking, but I decided to try poking a stick into it anyway just to see how far it went. The stick went all the way in. Hmm.
I reported my find to Stuart, who confirmed that, yes, the stick did go a long way in, and it was possible that this could be a point of entry. He duly moved one of the video cameras to point at the hole and we waited.
We didn't have to wait long. Early that evening notifications started appearing on our phones to say that he camera had filmed something. Lo and behold, there was a tiny pair of eyes peering out from the hole, followed by a body and a tail. And another pair of eye, body and tail. And another ... and so on.
Well, this was promising.
We watched rat after rat come out of the hole, and then overnight the camera recorded rat after rat going back into the hole some time in the early hours of the morning.
So, we hatched a plan. We would wait until the rats had all (or mostly) left the house for their nightly activities and then (after rigging up a light by which to work) we would fill the hole and hope that the mortar set before they could come back in again. This way we hoped we would avoid shutting rats inside the apartment.
We duly executed our plan. We watched and waited until we had counted 15, yes, 15, rats coming out of the hole, by which time it was 11:30pm at night. At that point I mixed up a bucket of mortar and then Stuart swung into action with his mortaring tools. By midnight we had finished. So we went to bed and waited to see what would appear on camera overnight.
As planned, the mortar set and by the time the rats came back around 5am the next morning, they couldn't find their way back in. They were stumped!
I have to confess to feeling quite sorry for them - they looked so bewildered and probably just wanted to get home to their beds!
And that, almost 6 months after we first found evidence of them. is where the story of the rats inside the apartment ends. Since that day (now 3 weeks ago) there hasn't been a single rodent inside the house. Finally, finally the saga comes to an end.
Rat Gate continues, of course, as we are now chasing them around outside - they are dancing on our roof at night (at least, that's what it sounds like) and stealing the chickens' food. But dealing with them outdoors is one heck of a lot less stressful than having them inside the house!
Rat Gate has really overshadowed our lives for, well 6 months, and we are actually incredibly grateful for the fact that lockdown coincided with this episode. The whole experience has been stressful enough, but would have been immeasurably worse had we had people booked in to come and stay in the apartment.
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