Critters in the Attic

I am a light sleeper. I basically have to have a room that is completely dark and quite to be able to fall asleep, I usually sleep 6 hours a night or less, and I wake up at the slightest sound. But, every 2 or 3 weeks, I have a "crash night" when I fall asleep quickly and sleep soundly the whole night.

Exactly one week from our move, I had a "crash night".  Last Thursday morning, I woke up when the alarm went off at 6:30 (I usually beat the alarm), and got up. Les, who usually sleeps till around 8, said, "I have been awake since 4am. There is something in the attic, I think a raccoon, and it sounded like it was doing construction all night. It was horrible. I thought it was going to come through the ceiling any minute." Wow, I slept through THAT??? 

That day, Les called our exterminator, who does not deal with animals in the attic, only bugs, but he offered 2 live traps. We bought cat food, and put the traps at the entrance to the crawl space under the house, thinking the pesky raccoons (Les had decided there were multiples) would come out for food. They sat there untouched for 2 days.

The animals were not actually in the attic. Our attic is converted, so the animals were in the space between the ceiling and the roof above. Most of the activity seemed to be over our bedroom area, so we slept in the kitchen the next night. Our feelings about raccoons come from the movie Elf, which shows that they are dangerous attack animals, so we took this seriously!

Les decided to go check out the situation. As he headed up the stairs with a rake, he said, "If I am not down in a few minutes, come check on me." And, I replied, "I'll call 911." And, then, "Les, why don't you get your gun?" To which he replied, "Jeannette, its a BB gun." I thought that a BB gun would be better than a rake, but I kept that opinion to myself.

He came down safely, said they were behind the sheetrock, behind the storage areas that are all around the attic room, but not actually in the room. That was good news. I googled, "raccoons in the attic" for a solution and read how terrible it is to have raccoons in your attic, how hard it is to get rid of them, and how imperative it is that you do get them out. One site suggested ammonia on rags or moth balls.  Another site said ammonia and moth balls do not work, you must physically remove the raccoons. Well, that was NOT going to happen.

We soaked some rags with ammonia and Les put them in the storage areas of the attic. We also turned on a radio in the attic, possibly to scare them out. The activity was still loud in the kitchen, so we moved our bed into the den. 

By Wednesday, Les decided maybe we had squirrels instead of raccoons. That did not seem as serious, and we felt better having decided they were squirrels. That day, our plumber was at the house, and he said that we should put a lot of moth balls in the attic, find out where they came in and seal it with special fine wire that squirrels could not chew through. We slept back in our bedroom.

Thursday night, we put 6 boxes of moth balls in the attic storage closets, hoping to run them out. This morning, Friday, Les actually saw a squirrel run up the front of the house and disappear into a corner of the roof! YAY. A squirrel sighting. Not as scary as a raccoon. He got the wire screen from the hardware store and put it in the far corners of the closet corners where the roof comes in, and we feel strongly that the critter situation is resolved.  We plan to sleep safely in our bedroom tonight.