Mystery solved.  That doesn’t make much of a post, though, does it?  On Monday this week, I took a deep breath and dove into (climbed up to) the eaves of our third-floor deck.  Since before we moved in, there has been a suspicious hole in the corner of the eaves.  It’s been getting larger and larger over the course of the year.  There were many reasons for putting this task off and the main one being that I didn’t have a ladder that would reach that high anymore.  I had an aluminium ladder when I was living in Texas, but I hated it!  It had several sharp edges wich would invariably hack one of my knees as I was climbing it – no matter how careful I was being.  This was ugly.  Have you ever gotten a small scratch on your skin while you were sweating profusely?  It looks like a horror show – blood all the way down my leg and onto my sock.  Looks like real serious hack-age.  The other thing was that it was really rickety.  I’m not sure how the ladders are rated, but I got one that maxes out at 225 lb.  So, at 215-220 pounds, plus tools, plus steel-tipped shoes (you’d be surprised how heavy they are if you’ve never worn them), plus any parts and supplies I might be bringing with me, I’d say that ladder was over-burdened.  Now, at 28′ up in the air, I’m not thinking I’ll like the sudden trip down if I really push the engineering of that ladder, huh?

I donated it to the Montessori school that the kids were going to in Texas before we moved.  They needed a ladder and they guy that they had doing maintenance there at the time didn’t have a ladder and he only weighed (tops) 150 lb.  What about the sharp edges?  Well, I think I’m the only idiot that does construction-type work wearing shorts.  Who says that ladder is idiot proof?  They loved having a way to get up to the roof to check filters and belts during the year, and it saved them from having to rent one every time they hired this guy to help out.

I wanted to get a new ladder ever since I’ve been in Chicago, but really thought it would be a good idea to get one that was made of fiberglass.  Our new house is in an older, well established neighborhood that has “real” power lines everywhere.  I like the idea of being insulated from the main coming into the building.  I’ve been working too long with high (much higher than household) voltage to get my ass smacked by 150 amps of 220 because I was too cheap to buy the better ladder. Fiberglass is a bit heavier and about 30% more expensive than the aluminium ones.

Having said all of that, I still needed a new ladder.  I’ve been carefully watching Craigslist for the past few weeks and, finally, I found a deal!  $150 for a 28-footer was something to take another look at.  I drove for about an hour to get to a little town called Morton Grove, maybe to look at it.  Bingo!  I found a perfect ladder for me.  I saved a good $200 by getting it used.  This was all last Sunday; Monday morning there was no excuse but to get up on it and move the project along.  And back to the beginning: deep breath and start tearing into it.

So I start by getting up close to the holes in the fascia boards.  I’ve never seen this kind of “wear” on wood like this.  It wasn’t birds or squirrels or bugs.  I did have a sense that it was mice only because a few months after I we moved into the house, I noticed some “mice poop” in a small area around the AC blower unit in the storage spaces on the third floor.  I set a few “humane” traps and got all three of them (might have been 4 – I forget) within 24 hours.  I put humane inside of quotes because of the scene that I saw when I retrieved the trap.  Let’s go on a little sidebar trip…

So, I go to the hardware store to get traps for the mice.  Look, I don’t think I’m a bad guy.  I know how the “snappy” traps work and thought that they would work fine if I could guarantee a good neck snap every time.  You and I both know that this is not always how they work and the same it true with most “kill-type” traps.  The glue ones are especially sick, so that was off the table.  Anyway, I find this neat-o humane trap that will host “up to 4 mice.”  So that’s what it says on the package and, quite honestly, that’s what it will do – with a caveat.  I was looking for the ability to get rid of the mice and not have to endure the smell of death inside my walls because I poisoned them and hoped that they would just go away.  I also didn’t want to think that I tortured these creatures either.  That seems a bit unfair; after all, they aren’t in my house looking to kill me in my sleep and if I had a wolf hiding in my attic, I would go for the kill or maim thing.  We were not quite there yet.  So, being pleased with my find, I purchased Qty. 1 of the happy-rat-be-gone trap and was having good thoughts of driving them out to the beautiful lakefront park and releasing them to have a peaceful, happy, and profitable life.  [imagine the basketball end-of-quarter clock sounding here]  I got home and put my hunk of smelly peanut butter in the “put bait here” section of the trap.  I walked my happy ass up to the third floor and put the trap right where I thought they would be using as a walkway (Do mice stop to poop?  I don’t think so because they leave a trail of poop everywhere.  Maybe their buttholes have no sphincter muscle and they just “pop” when the body’s done with the food – I dunno, but I know that I don’t think I can poop while I’m walking.).  There was an unmistakable trail that I could put the trap near and that’s what I did.

Now, this trap works on the “door locks from one side” principle.  The mouse smells the bait and starts to walk down a nice hallway.  The little mousie comes to a door and says, “Hmm, smells like the food is just past this door.”  The little mousie pushes on the door (no doorbell or knocker) and it opens right away.  It’s just like Goldilocks, “nobody’s home and, mmm, the porridge smells just divine!”  Well, what the mousie doesn’t know is the door is weighted to close behind him…”okay, they don’t like the kids to leave the doors open because nobody likes flies in the house.  I’ll deal with that later.”  Mousie runs down the hallway and into the dining room.  “Aah, there it is!  Wow, that’s a suspiciously large morsel of peanut butter, but damn that thing looks good.”  This brings up another aside:  mice probably don’t have a word for (or a good translation for): “Oh Shit! Run for Your Lives!!!”  and the other part of that is they seem to be very tenacious and overly resourceful, which brings me to the ugly conclusion…they obviously travel in packs and don’t talk much.  Mouse number 2, 3, and, perhaps 4 (don’t remember) follow closely behind.  Now, I’m not sure what exactly happened, but within about 8 hours of setting the trap and setting it, I found 3 (or 4) dead mice; they weren’t just dead, though.  There was lots of blood everywhere and a couple had been partially eaten.  The trap was not humane!  It was the house of TERROR!  So how do you get rid of this mess?  Dude, it was nasty in a wholesale way.  With 2 Target bags and 1 Ziplock bag in the cans in the garage, I retreated to my humble home-now-terrorist-headquarters, to ponder what I would have seen if one of the mice had been carrying an iPhone 4.  Damn, fresh dead mice smell nasty!

As I was saying before, I had never seen that kind of wear or deterioration of boards before, but it stopped getting bigger after that massacre I just described.  There was not much rot, but I thought if another critter had that same idea, he’d at least have to endure some serious GI issues because my plan was to replace it with extruded PVC.  Next step was to measure everything up, sort out the cut list and go to the hardware store.  Everything went well, except that I started seeing some huge carpenter ants once in a while when I was doing the demolition.  There weren’t coming from what I was working on, but they had to have been coming from someplace close.  Just above the eaves was,  well, flashing and above that a decorative deck fence.  The deck is accessible from the third floor, but there’s no door, it’s just a window access.  Anyway, the fence was looking ragged and was on my to-do list.  I needed to partially dismantle that fence to move the flashing enough to take the boards away, so I figured that this was the time to get a closer look at the fence.  It was the source of the carpenter ants alright!  I almost threw the hammer that I was using to knock the fence apart into the street at one point, as the wood was so wet and soft that it was like whacking a sheet of paper with the hammer.  Sometimes I wonder who the hell puts these things together; the wood was cheap, the cross cuts were not primed and there was no sealant on any of the joints.  To make things worse, the posts were “boxes” and not solid wood, well it wasn’t solid wood in any way anymore.  My neighbor said that the fence on the roof deck wasn’t more than 5 years old.  Crap.  I have to re-do the whole thing.  The good thing about this was that it was an ugly, flubby fence and didn’t fit the scale of the house, so I get the chance to make it again, and make it right.

On Thursday, I completed the repair of the fascia because they were predicting rain and I wanted to get it buttoned up.  The PVC looks like a million bucks and it all went in without a hitch.  I cleaned up the flashing and re-sealed all of the old nail holes from the fence that I removed and we’re ready for paint.  I’ll keep you posted on the fence.  I think I want to go with a short fence, but taller than the  old one – so about 3′ tall and 4×4 posts instead of 10×10.  The tops of the posts will be finished off with copper caps. It’ll look da bomb!  One major difference: the ends of the boards will be sealed.  Always remember that if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself or watch those you hire like a hawk until you get that they know how to do stuff to last.  I’ll keep you posted.