I was wearing an N95 respirator, but once I got into it I was seriously wishing I had put on a Tyvek suit. After several rounds of sweeping and cleaning and scooping and vacuuming, with an exhaust fan blowing dust out through the window, I took my clothes off in the laundry room and went straight to the shower.

Now Michael is in there bleach mopping the whole room. We're gonna let it dry out before going back in and doing more work.

Rat shit around here may contain Hantavirus and Leptospira bacteria.

The nests are also home to "kissing bugs" (family Triatominae) that spread Chagas Disease. The kissing bugs feed on your blood and poop on your skin. When you itch the bites, possibly unconsciously in your sleep, you can spread the feces into the wound, providing an entryway for the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi that causes Chagas disease.

I knew this was gonna be a big, gross job, which is why I had put it off for so long. But doing a search for what illnesses pack rats in Southern Arizona might carry, plus the increasing smell, was enough to convince me that It Is Time.

And just for fun they were cockroaches living under there too.

By the way, here's a pro tip for sealing up plumbing intrusions and making them rat proof and cockroach proof:

Wrap the hole with multiple layers of quarter inch or half inch hardware cloth nailed or stapled to the surrounding wood and wired tightly to the pipe. Create a multi layer wire cage in the opening. Then fill the whole space with spray foam.

Rodents will not be able to chew through this, it will keep out roaches and you get the added benefit of sealing against airflow.

This is what we will do around the drain pipe when we replace the bathtub. I'll post photos when we get around to it. But this method is cheap, easy and very effective.

Progress!
This is the bathtub area after all the rat poo had been cleaned up. I shoveled and swept it all out, then he used a shop vac on it, then we bleach mopped the whole room.

That flooring is 7/8" clear, old growth fir tongue and groove. It provides both the subfloor and the floor for the entire house. Subsequent remodels have involved putting 3/16 plywood over it, then carpet or stick-on cheap linoleum tiles on that, but I'm ripping that out and replacing it with probably 5/8 plywood. Only the bathroom is getting done right now.

Still haven't decided on the finish floor.

What the shower alcove looks like this evening at quitting time. I opened up the floor, removed the crappy old siding and scraped up all the old linoleum tiles.

The green you see is a tarp laying on the ground in the crawlspace underneath the house. I crawled under and spread it out to catch all the rat poo and cactus thorns that I knew would fall down there. I'll pull it out tomorrow and we'll get underneath there and start figuring out the new plumbing.

And look who I found! In the fir tongue and groove siding behind the shower unit a hole had been chewed into the wall cavity. When I started taking that apart, I found the rat hiding in there!

Such a cutie. I grabbed a couple towels and was able to corner him up in the wall cavity grab him and throw him out the window. He scampered over the wall into the neighbors yard.

Between the neighbor's cat, the great horned owl that lives nearby, the large rattlesnake that the neighbor across the alley found the other day, the Harris' hawks, the coyotes and the bobcats, I don't think he will be around for too long. I will not miss the little fucker, but it's gonna take forever to get the smell out of there even with bleach.

Day Two of #RatShitRemodel.

According to the deed, this house was built in 1945, though the realtor back in 2007 said that she thought it was 1925. Either way, it's ~ century old and has gone through several remodels, none of them particularly "up to spec."

The more we tore into everything, the more information we got about what was actually in the walls and under the floor.

By late afternoon today it became fairly apparent to both of us (even to me who is paying for all this) that we should strip it to the bones and start from scratch. So that's what we did!

We removed what in some cases was two layers of sheet rock and the original bead board underneath it.

More description in alt text.

The vanity and toilet area when those things were removed and the sheet rock was stripped off. The original bead board is what you're seeing, covered in (certainly lead based) sickly green paint. But, that wood is clear, tight grain, old growth fir and the back sides are still raw wood and in great shape. We tore all this off and I will be reusing it, which I'll describe later.

The style of this house is what I described as "low budget Craftsman" or maybe "Craftsman-inspired." As I, over time, remodel each section, Craftsman style will be a rough guide, but not something I try to adhere to dutifully.

You can see the paint "scar" left by the very tall baseboards, a common feature of Craftsman style. The hole in the wall was a medicine cabinet and you can see the original sink mark below that and the toilet tank mark lower on the left.

#RatShitRemodel

This is the original cast-iron vent stack, where it comes up from the crawlspace. Note the giant gaps left behind and around it! It's rather amazing that the rats never found this hole and created a nest in this wall too.

No rats, but it was full of a century of cockroach frass, as well as a few roaches. I was not as kind with the roaches as I was with the rat yesterday. Just sayin

All these gaps will get sealed tight when we're done.

#RatShitRemodel

Here's something interesting. It may not be obvious, so I'll explain it. Modern stick framed houses are built in a manner known as platform framing. Floor joists are laid across from one part of the foundation to the next, spanning the gap above what will become the crawlspace. And then a solid sheet of, typically, 1-1/8 inch tongue and groove plywood sub flooring is screwed and glued to the top of the joists. This creates a very solid integral platform that is extremely stable. Then the walls are framed on top of that.

In this house, the joists were set and then the wall plate was built directly on top of the joists. Then the sub flooring, in this case one by four tongue and groove boards, was put down on top of the joists after the fact.

When they did so, they left this huge gap that allows any creatures from the crawlspace to access wall cavities if there are any irregularities. That's how the cockroaches were getting in.

Based on things like the type of material, the date stamped on the sheetrock and so, we figure one of the remodels happened in the late 1950s and another one in the late '80s or '90s, and possibly some smaller modifications here or there over the years.

We are tearing all of this old stuff out: wall coverings, wiring, plumbing — and replacing it with efficient, nontoxic, safer modern materials.

But I will note a certain wistfulness in doing this. Peeling through the layers, we find things like carpenter's marks from people who have probably passed away long ago. I can imagine the builders in 1945 melting lead and pouring it into the joints of the vent stack, or someone else 40 years ago being proud of their new, modern looking, white sheetrock covered bathroom. No more ugly, green lead paint!

As we peel off the layers, it's easy to imagine the lives that have been lived in that space, as well as the people who built it. How many people? Who were they? Were they happy?

#RatShitRemodel

Each wall we open up is like an archaeology dig. We have fun trying to decipher the original purpose of each piece of orphan pipe, strangely placed hole or puzzling method of framing.

It all tells the history of the house and the people who have lived here and built it, as well as keeping a record of the styles and materials that were popular over the last hundred years.

But we are tearing it all out. I noted previously I feel a little wistful about that. 50 years from now, a future remodeler will not have this experience. They will only find the original framing and what we will be adding in the next week as we put it all back together.

It will be nice! Rat proof! Cockroach proof! Insulated! A new fancy shower. Nothing will leak. The toilet will flush properly.

But the ghosts that have lived hidden in the walls will be gone. And that feels a little sad.

#RatShitRemodel

The #RatShitRemodel as of this morning. We had to remove the old subfloor to get to the plumbing. Doing so revealed that past leaks had caused some degradation in the joists.

The wood still has plenty of integrity, so we are going to sister new 2x6s onto the existing ones instead of removing them. Both of the vent pipes to the left have been removed. Neither was hooked up or functioning properly. We will replace it with standard, modern 2 inch ABS.

I spent the whole afternoon under the house in a Tyvek suit, belly crawling under the house with a cordless recip saw hacking out what felt like miles of abandoned water and gas line.

I was also trying to figure out where the main waterline comes in to the house, but still haven't. Most of the waterlines under the house are half inch copper, which functions adequately. But one section is only 3/8 copper that needs to be upgraded. The big problem is that it's all one system, including the spigots on the outside walls. By the time water is getting pushed through a garden hose, it has very little pressure. I need to fix this so I can run timers and drippers.

#RatShitRemodel

#RatShitRemodel update!
Maybe should now call it #RattlerRemodel!

I was in the far back corner of the house, and had just hacked the last chunk of an abandoned gas line out from under the floor when I saw a little reptile head drop into a pocket in a cinder block that was protruding from the foundation.

"Oh hi lizard," I said and then moved my face closer to see what it was… and then bolted back immediately when I saw that it was a rattlesnake coiled up in there!

Remember, I'm in this crawlspace, belly crawling with very little room to move and seeing the snake 18 inches from my face in the light of my headlamp!

I scooched out of there super fast and crawled out between the joists in the bathroom. My friend who I'm working with and I pondered what to do.

My first thought was to get a bag of ice out of the freezer and cover the snake with it, coiled up as it was in that small little pocket. Once the snake got really cold, it probably wouldn't be able to move very fast. I got an extra-long-handled pointy-nose pliers and we put some plastic pipe extenders on the handles, to make them about 2 1/2 feet long. The idea was to chill the snake and then I would reach into the cavity with the pliers, grab it and put it in a bucket with a lid.

But...

#RatShitRemodel

When I went back under the house, the snake had left its hidey hole and was now semi stretched out on the top of the foundation. It turns out it was a much bigger rattlesnake than I had thought originally!

I didn't want to lose sight of it, so I instructed Michael on how to make a noose out of of a broomstick. He did so and then I scooched back over to the snake and noosed it easily.

Then I crawled out with it, keeping enough tension on the noose to hold the snake while trying not to hurt it, crawled out through the joists and then stuck the snake through the bathroom window where Michael had a bucket.

Now that the sun is down, I'm going to take it a few blocks away to the edge of the desert and let it go.

The original location of the snake was farther back, where there was much less room to maneuver.

#RatShitRemodel

Michael took some videos of me pulling the rattlesnake out, that I will try to share later.

Just another day at the #RatShitRemodel

Bitey snake in the bucket. Such a handsome guy. Western diamondback. They're very common around here.

The black-and-white stripes are to help call visual attention to the rattle and the sound that the snake is making. Rattlesnakes are generally reclusive and rarely aggressive. The purpose of the rattle is to warn you off.

This is a form of aposematism, a very clear warning that this animal is not good to eat or mess with. Is it fascinating evolutionary adaptation. Wikipedia has a good discussion of it. Worth following some of the links too!

#Snake #Rattlesnake #Herps #Herpetology