All right, I admit it: There are probably many more pressing issues out there I could ruminate about than apartments and apartment living. But as a 30-year+ homeowner, I was reminded again this week of some definite advantages of NOT being a homeowner. Namely, if we were living in a nice apartment or fancy condo or something somewhere, we wouldn’t have been out the $600+ we just finished paying this week for a bat exclusion.
I’ve talked about our bat colony in other posts, apparently on one of my other blogs, because a search turned up no results here. I’ll be as brief as possible. We moved into our current home in April 1980 — yes, a long time, I know — and soon afterward discovered there was a colony of bats living in the roof above the upstairs rooms we had roughed in out of what was one big upstairs attic space originally.
From then until the early autumn of 2005, we tried everything to get the bats to leave. They had this nasty habit each spring through summer of swooping down into the living quarters in our house. (My kids grew up pretty much embarrassed about their father’s cowardice in the face of the bats. To be honest, I whined like a baby child and let my wife confront any winged intruders with a sturdy tennis racket. But that’s another story.) In 2005, we found a wildlife animal control specialist (?) who did bat exclusions. He did one for us, giving us his assurance they were gone and also his 2-year warranty.
Last spring (almost 4 years after the exclusion) — the bats came back. They found some weakened protective screens on our old house’s roof vents and popped right in and right back to the old nesting area. (We heard them rustling around and holding bat-type house warmings, inviting all their little bat friends.)
Batman returned and did another exclusion ($119 for the initial inspection and evaluation; $490 for the work itself), which we just paid for this week.
Let’s put it this way. When I was a kid, we almost always lived in apartments. We had, at times, really noisy, annoying neighbors. There were a few run down places with bad heating, no cooling in the summer, and an occasional leaky roof. All those things various willing and unwilling landlords took care of, or we moved.
As a homeowner, those things are my responsibility now. With all the joys and perks of homeownership now comes the radical decline in home prices/value, so moving away is hardly an option. We learned to live with the bats (thanks again to my wife and her trusty tennis racket) until batman got the exclusion done. Then we paid for it.
I’m mulling over the idea of having someone climb up on our roof and put up big “NO BATS WELCOME IN THIS HOUSE” signs all over. I know that won’t do any good. The little critters will do their best to come home again. Let’s hope it’s BEFORE September 2011, so we’ll at least be covered by batman’s warranty.