A few hours and three hundred dollars later, the porch overhang is gone. An improvement that was long overdue. It’s so much more open and light both in the backyard and inside the house. This project is like one of those low-touch, high-value whiz-bang changes they do on HGTV.
Unfortunately rats started raining from the sky during the process. I only saw one scramble out, but my helper Ricardo assured me that about six others exited during deconstruction. There was a nest up in that little space, and what’s even grosser, a small hole into the attic in that corner circled in red.
No possum ever emerged. Perhaps I imagined what I saw to be larger, or perhaps the possum was up there to eat the rats. I may never know.
I went against my green instincts and purchased some D-Con poison cubes at Home Depot and shoved them up in that hole. Since then I’ve seen a rat at two different times either around or on top of the back fence.
I have reached the limit of what I can tolerate rat-wise, and so I have a pest control guy coming out this afternoon to assess the situation.
Meanwhile, I am investigating how to repair the two 10-foot sections of gutter that are now missing. Before, that gutter ran around the edge of the porch roof. I called what appears to be the most reputable and favored gutter repair place on Angieslist. Not surprisingly, the quote seems high: $437. Does that seem high to anyone else? It took the guy nearly an hour of measuring and calculating to come up with the quote, which seems ridiculous to me. That right there was $100 of it.
erin covert * hands on 
Possums do not eat rats, so you probably just saw a Big Rat’s Butt backing out of that hole. Those poison cubes will work, but you run the risk of a rat crawling into your attic or one of your walls to die. They stink will bad for 4-5 days, but they eventually evaporate and stop sinking.
The patio does look better.
D
In addition to measuring, gutter guy probably had to check the facing boards (perhaps too rotten to nail up something new), check to see if the house had settled to somewhere off level over time, and several other things I can’t think of. Perhaps you’d have been upset if he had to triple his quote in the middle of the job?
Rats?! Don’t you feel like you’re back in Chicago now?
I bought one of those humane traps…put it away when it sunk in that if I caught something, how the heck was I suppose to carefully pick up and cart off that cage with a crazy, snarling rat inside. Yuck. I called Terminix…maybe good for bugs, but not for rodents, not the guy that showed up here anyway…I got my money back.
I would up buying all sorts of poison too. The traps are what did them in though. I had to stick a baby gate in the garage so my dog wouldn’t step on one accidentally.
As for the gutters…I had them put on my whole house (okay, not a huge house, but still) for less…well, it was also a few years ago when aluminum was cheaper… Even if your fascia boards are falling off your house, they’re about $20 for an 18′ section (well, in Jersey) so I’m not getting the $437? $37 in material, $400 in labor for the hour it’ll take him to do it? I’m redoing the fascia boards myself soon. You could probably throw those gutters on yourself…it’s not exactly rocket science if you’re just a smidge handy.
good luck with everything!