April 29, 2006
Away, parasites!
Today, I took down the metal cladding on the porch ceiling, revealing all kinds of nasty raccoon detritus. I did figure out how to do it sort of neatly after some trial and error, but still a messy job. It’s fairly obvious that Mr. Concrete or his minions banged up the metal on top of shredded or missing boards, but we’ll just pass over that.
More of the same tomorrow, as the wooden ceiling comes down. It may be possible to be better-organized about that job, though, since I’ll be able to clear an access hole and clean the tops of the boards before they’re ripped down from below.
One thing I revealed was an enormous number of little foam shreds, both beige and pink, clearly from the foam insulation we put in last fall. When we thought we heard chewing and scratching from under the bay window this spring, we probably really were.
The solution to present and future raccoons is becoming obvious – we need to just get rid of the porch ceiling and not have one any more. We can look at the roof structure from below – that’s fine. A couple of coats of white paint might make it look nicer. Maybe we should use the kill-anything primer that R&D used in their house – it would still be much cheaper than 160 sq/ft of boards.
This approach wraps up a number of problems. There will be an easy way to get at the bottom of the bay window, for example, which (being inaccessible till now) is a weak point in our insulation.
