We came home from Thailand with rats again... They come up the drain in our kitchen. We have a bunch of pipes that have to go down the drain and we need it for drainage, so we haven't been able to figure out how to close it up. Anyway, we came home and saw evidence in our kitchen that we had a rat. Luckily we had the kitchen door closed while we were gone, so he didn't go past our kitchen. We cleaned our kitchen (scrubbed and scoured) the next morning and thought he must be gone... until that night....
Our friends Joe & Amberley were over and we ordered out (still a little afraid to use the kitchen). As they were leaving that night, Joe saw the rat and showed Adam... You can see him in this picture below on top of the pink bucket. I know it's hard to see, but I'm taking this picture through the screen on the kitchen door... I didn't want to go in there :)
This rat was the biggest yet. You can't really tell from the picture because only his rear end is showing, but he was at least a foot long (not counting the tail) and he was really fat (must have been the toffees that he found in our kitchen and ate)... Anyway, once Joe & Amberley left, Adam got out the squeegee to try to get this monster rat. You can see below (sort of) what happened....
Even though the door was closed, I was still freaked out when the rat went flying towards me... he really did fly - haha! You can't see well in the video, but it was funny :) The squeegee broke into 4 pieces!! Anyway, he hid behind the washer and we eventually chased him out of there and back down the drain. After that we decided it was necessary to figure out something we could do to keep rats from coming up again. We stuffed some steel wool down the drain (which does make it drain slower) and put a heavy brick over the hole... hopefully it will work :) We'll see.... and we have to figure out how to close our bathroom drains too :) Ahh... rats....
Comments
I wonder it mosquito netting would allow the pipe to drain better? Although I bet the steel wool blocks them better.
In high school I had some mice living in the attic next to my room that I would hear scampering about at night. Worse than that, though, was the traps I would hear snap on the mice in the middle of the night. Shudder!
We thought about using some wire mesh or wire screen and caulking it down around the drain... hopefully the rats won't be able to get through that! :)
Freaks me out, man...
Tara- Every time we have a rat I think about you :)
Emily - We just ordered our 5th squeegee in a year - haha!
And steel wool works great... rats don't like biting into that... Brad Be a man... has the best rat story... can outdo anybody... ask him sometime.
did we ever tell you about the rat we saw in Bangalore one night... he was mangy and evidently really sick -- that's why he was kind of hobbling around in the road. But we were in the car and I thought about running over him to put him out of his misery. But... he was so big I was afraid he would bite my tire and puncture it! Our 3 girls were pretty freaked out at his huge hump back! Blessings, Neill & 4 girls