Rodent Removal in North Park

The North Park bungalow is a wood-frame house from the 1910s or 1920s with wide open eaves, and every one of those eaves has gaps a roof rat can use. The exposed rafter tails leave a bay between each pair where the roof sheathing meets the top of the wall, and the original builder closed those bays with a thin board or a strip of screen that has had a hundred years to shrink, split or rust. The Dryden Historic District near Morley Field is the best-known run of these houses, with 136 homes along 28th and Pershing designated in 2011, and the same construction repeats on block after block across the neighborhood.

The gap in a rafter bay is often wider than the half inch a rat needs, and it sits directly above the porch or the side yard where a rat has already climbed the downspout or the trellis. The University of Florida extension gives a quarter inch as the standard to seal to, since that stops a mouse as well. The contractor we route closes each bay from the attic side with hardware cloth cut to fit, which leaves the rafter tails and the fascia looking as they did. Roof rat removal in North Park is a job of many small openings on one roofline.

North Park's lots are narrow and its blocks are served by alleys, which means a roof rat in North Park lives close to several houses at once and moves between them along the fence tops and the garage roofs. The neighborhood started as a lemon grove in the 1890s, and citrus is still common in the back yards, along with the mature palms and the ivy on the fences that the county names as roof rat harborage. A detached garage on the alley with a gap under its door and a fruit tree beside it is where many North Park infestations begin, before the rat follows the fence to the main house.

Roof rats climb; the County of San Diego Vector Control notes they are the county's common rat and that they prefer to go up. The trip from an alley garage to an eave is a few yards along a fence and a foot up a downspout. Rats in a neighborhood this dense also carry a shared risk, since a household that puts out bait blocks can send a poisoned rat into a neighbor's wall, where it dies. The EPA describes most rodenticides as anticoagulants that kill four days to two weeks after the rat begins feeding, and that is time enough to walk next door. Trapping keeps the outcome in the trap.

Nearly every pre-war house in North Park stands on a raised foundation, and the crawl space under the floor is inspected on every job because it is the second way in. The foundation vents around the perimeter were screened with light wire when the house was built, and the ones on the alley side and behind the water heater closet are often open. Inside, the crawl space connects to the wall cavities and from there to the attic, so a rat that enters at grade can be heard in the ceiling a week later.

The sealing of a crawl space means new quarter-inch hardware cloth in every vent frame, a sweep on the access door, and metal around the plumbing and gas penetrations, using the 18 to 22 gauge cloth and metal weather stripping the county recommends. A rat that has already died under the floor is a separate problem with its own smell, and dead rodent removal is quoted on its own line when the inspection finds one. The whole roofline and crawl space list is what rodent exclusion covers on a bungalow. Nobody who has spent a week listening to the ceiling at 3am needs convincing that it is worth doing; the contact page or the phone, answered 24 hours a day, gets it started.