RATS! A Guest Column

 On May 10, we began the move into our new apartment.  It is in the same building as our old apartment.  In fact, it is just down the hall on the same floor.  Our lease renewal was coming up on our old apartment and the rent on our old apartment was going up significantly.  If we were going to pay a bunch more for our old apartment, why not get a bigger and refurbished apartment for slightly more than what our new rent was going to be?  The new apartment would still be a one-bedroom, but would have a study and would also have a half-bath by the front door.  The big draw for us is the study, which is too small to be considered a second bedroom but will be big enough to have a crib [because SPOILER! pregnant].  The half-bath is unnecessary (except for if we have guests over who want to use the bathroom without going through our bedroom, but we almost never have guests) and is actually a hindrance as it takes away from kitchen space.

Our lease on the old apartment did not run out until the May 16th, so for almost a week we effectively had two apartments.  This turned out to be nice as it allowed us to gradually shift all of our stuff over.  The move was just Sadie and me.  We could do it ourselves and did not want to bother anyone from church or from my softball team to help, nor did we need to pay any professionals.

Things began smoothly.  There will always be issues – the new kitchen has less counter-space, cabinet space, and drawer space, than our old one (Curse you unnecessary half-bath!!); you have to figure out which bookcase goes where; where does the dresser go so it does not block the outlet; which outlet goes to which wall switch; etc. – but things seemed to be going okay.  But the positive beginnings did not last.

When we inspected the apartment before signing the lease, the apartment smelled like cleaning stuff.  They had just had the carpet shampooed.  They also always had all the windows open.  However, as we moved in and closed the windows (allergies and turning on the AC), the clean smell dissipated and something else was unveiled.

Our apartment stinks.  The half-bath stinks like feces.  I figured that there was some past toilet overflow so I scrubbed every single tile in the half-bath as well as the walls around the toilet in case there was some spray from the toilet. That did not fix it.  Moreover, because the half-bath shares a wall with the kitchen, the kitchen stank too.  Especially when the fridge’s air-compressor fan turned on, pulling air in at the back of the fridge, pulling that air from places like the outlet that leads to the void space behind the wall.  A smell like a bad gas-station bathroom would blow out from around the edges of the fridge, filling our kitchen with vomit-inducing odor.  That is not what you want to be smelling when you are cooking or eating.

The laundry room also stinks.  Something rotten or urine related or otherwise foul fills the laundry room with an abominable odor.  That odor then leaks through the wall into the study and through the laundry room doors into the living room area.

yellow indicates stink sources. but don't be fooled. half the apartment smells.

I decided that the whole situation was probably the result of the previous tenant probably having a cat.  Our old apartment had developed a significant odor problem when the next-door neighbor did not take care of their cat’s waste.  In that case the smell came through the walls into our apartment through the void space between the apartments. Every outlet and light-switch in our apartment on the wall between her apartment and ours would pour forth cat waste smell.  We taped over our outlets and eventually management addressed the issue by cutting out the wall (with its urine-soaked drywall on the neighbor’s side), replacing the drywall, and filling the void space with materials to block the smell coming over.  

With our new apartment, I figured that something similar was going on.  If the litter box had been in the laundry room and a second one located in the half-bath, then the odors there would make sense.  The drywall would need to be cut out and replaced, and some sanitizing solution would be needed to be sprayed on non-replaceable surfaces like the wooden framing.  It would be like pulling teeth to get the management office to do what needed to be done, but it was a solvable issue.  In the meantime, we would use the kitchen/dining area as little as possible, avoid the study, and mostly stay out of the living room.  We would basically limit ourselves to the bedroom and the main bathroom.  I would do laundry as infrequently as possible, and wear a gas mask when I did laundry.  We also would keep as many belongings as possible that did not fit in the bedroom to just the living room where it was less smelly and so would absorb and retain fewer odors.  It also would allow contractors the space to work on the walls.

After a couple of weeks of bothering the front office, we finally got contractors in to work on the situation.  The night before they arrived, I heard a chewing and scratching sound at 3 am coming from the closet of the study.  Baseball bat in hand, I investigated but did not find anything.  The next morning I found that something had chewed a hole in the ceiling of the closet of the study.  What had chewed the hole?  Mouse, rat, squirrel, chupacabra? Was it a possible clue as to the source of the smell, or was it unrelated?  

The contractors performed their agreed upon tasks and removed portions of the study wall and the half-bathroom wall.  The smell persisted but with no obvious source.  They also patched over the new hole in the ceiling of the study’s closet.  Before putting the walls back up, they had an exterminator come by to check for other possible sources of smell.  

RATS.

WE HAVE RATS IN OUR WALLS.

We have a rats nest in the wall behind the half-bathroom’s sink/vanity.  That is the source of the smell in the half-bathroom.  The rats use a route from that nest that goes behind the wall behind the fridge, which only spreads their odor further and intensifies the situation in the kitchen.

The wall that had been removed in the half-bath only gave a small view of the rats nest, but from what I could see it was filled with rat droppings, rat hair, and torn up insulation covered in rat urine.  The exterminator spritzed the area and their route to behind the fridge with a poisonous powder that the rats will get on their paws and on their coats, then ingest when they eat and groom.  He said not to touch anything or disturb the rats nest as we want them to run around in the powder.  He came back a couple of days later to find that there were lots of rat tracks through the powder.  He spritzed some more powder in the area and then the contractors walled it all back up (and put the wall back in the study).  We are hopeful that the rats have died.  That was more than three weeks ago.

It was hoped that the rats would die and that all the odors would quickly fade without a source constantly renewing them.  The odor in the half-bath and the kitchen has diminished some, but has definitely not gone away.  The rats nest with its droppings and urine-soaked insulation is still sitting behind the wall, mouldering away.  The powder the exterminator squirted is supposed to also dry things out, but I have doubts that it will really address the smell of the nest.  Maybe it will eventually all fade away, but I don’t believe it.  The wall behind the fridge, which is where the tracks behind the wall led, has not been removed or looked behind.  The fridge continues to blow out foul odor out from around its edges when the air-compressor is active.

our laundry supplies

The smell in the laundry room has not abated in the least.  The odor is no longer seeping into the study as it had been, but it still fills the laundry room and spills out through the laundry room doors to invade the living room and the hall connecting our living room with our bedroom.

The smell is not coming up from below with the pipes connected to the washer.  It is not coming in from the laundry vent.  It is not from mold/mildew in the washer.  I have sniffed all over in there, including getting a chair in there to smell atop the dryer and around the ceiling, and I am fairly certain that the smell is originating from an area above the ceiling.  I do not know what is up there.

Now we run into the problems of bureaucracy and capitalism.  Unfortunately, before anything can be done to clean out the rats nest in the half-bath, to remove the wall behind the fridge to clean anything out back there, or to access the area above the laundry room, it has to get prior authorization.  If the exterminator wants to drill a hole to snake a camera into the area above the laundry room, it has to go through the maintenance guy, who has to get it through the front office.  As well-meaning as the people in the front office are, their hands are almost always tied as just about everything has to go through corporate.  Our apartment complex is owned and operated by a distant mega-corporation that owns or runs apartment complexes all over the country.  Before a contractor does anything (like tear down walls), they have to assess the job to be done, submit a bid with all of the specifics (what is going to be done, when it will be done, how it will be done, and how much it will cost to be done), and get approval from corporate.  They are also supposed to coordinate with local maintenance and the local front office.  Miscommunications inevitably crop up as to who is doing what and when, a problem made worse by the contractor (and all of his employees) having English as a second language and our maintenance guy not speaking Spanish.  The pest control guy is a separate contractor, which adds further complications in coordination.  Meanwhile, corporate wants to keep all costs to the absolute minimum and would much rather drag its feet as much as possible and try to get us to just put up with the smell and get used to it.  They will not spring for a more expensive (and competent/thorough) contractor or pest control specialist.  The exterminator that has come by is someone they only reach out to when things get really bad, preferring to keep their regular pest-control contract with an inadequate, but cheaper, company.  Better to repair and repent than prepare and prevent, especially if you drag out the repair process so long that your tenant quits bugging you and just decides to live with the problem.

Eventually, a week ago, the exterminator was granted permission to drill a small hole in the ceiling of the laundry room and snake a camera up there.  No rat was seen.  At this point, it is likely necessary to do a significant gutting of the laundry room to find and fix the source of the rotten waste smell.  That would be such a significant project that it is not really feasible to do it while people are living in the apartment.

This situation has affected every part of our lives.  We cannot have anyone come by and visit (no people from church, no softball friends, the sister missionaries came over once to give Sadie cookies, but we could not let them in).  I can’t use the treadmill due to the smell and the lack of space in the living room with so many of our belongings piled up there.  Sadie has similar issues trying to do yoga.  It is hard to cook and hard to eat in the apartment, so our diets have changed.  We now have three air-purifiers running 24/7, and we also have the bathroom fan in the half-bath always on, so our electricity bill is up.  Dirty laundry piles up, raising the possibility of mildew setting in on the clothes (especially with sweaty exercise clothes).  We are more stressed.  We are less able to relax.  It does not feel like we have a home right now – we have an apartment where our stuff is, but it does not feel like a home.

We’ve given the office a proposed solution: let us move to a different apartment. Then they will be free to tear out and tear up as much as they need to fix the problem.  However, there aren’t other apartments available like ours (single bedroom plus study), so we asked for a 2-bedroom. That apartment, though it is only 30 more sq ft, is $600 more per month. So we asked to keep our current rent price but live in the non-smelly new apartment. As you can guess, that has to go through corporate–who doesn’t have to deal with the smell, and so doesn’t see the urgency.

Limbo is hell.

~Mark