"Good god what died!" cried my wife. "Hey! It's not my fault (this time)." I said.
Apparently something has died near our master BR; therefore, either attic, wall, or crawlspace. This is where I try to tell myself the smell isn't really that bad. I'm not succeeding with that plan. It's foul!
So, in our downpour this morning, I'm cleaning gutters, I prefer to clean gutters in the rain (it conserves water), and I notice that the crawlspace vent screens have been torn back on two of the vents. We've heard animal noises under the house recently (I should have checked sooner) and I've had to trap raccoons on occasion over our years in this house.
What should I do to rescreen the vents so that they are raccon-proofed. They pulled the screens and nails out of the wood. Will screws be enough?
Don't leave tools out for the racoons to use. They do have more trouble with screwdrivers than nails though, so they should work better. You could try the louvered covers instead of the screened ones if they are tearing the screen too. Screens can also be added to the inside if you want to crawn under the house. Stapled in chicken wire should be pretty effective.
My neighbor had his metal roof vent ripped off by racoons then they moved in. I would think it must have been partialy damaged already, but now I see Coon friendly roof vents, all plastic.
The chain link sounds adequate, but for the r ecord:
Our house in Indianapolis, built between 1952 and 56, had cast metal coverings for the crawl-space "windows". Maybe 8 inches high and 12 or 14 inches wide in our case, there was a fixed piece, with maybe 8 vertical slits about 3/4 inch wide each, and 3/4 inch bars (flat bars, more like strips case as part of the main fixed piece) in between each one. There was a slide lever at the top that made a same sized piece, that say behind the fixed piece, move. So that to the left, all the slits were open, and to the right all the slits were shut. Something like the window in a prison solitary confinement door.
I don't know where they sell these things, but they probably do. I guess the vents would have been big enough for mice, unless maybe there was a screeen behind them. I can't remember.
We were told by the previous owner, probably, to open all the vents in the spring and close them in the fall, or maybe vice versa.
Suppposed to be good for the crawl space, the bottom of which was 3 or
4 feet below the first floor, which was about one foot above the yard outside. We only looked in the crawlspace about 5 times in the 8 years we lived there. It was always a mudhole, and the kind of mud that would have been verty dirty and would have clung to ones shoes even if it ever dried out. But it also caused no problems. We didn't do anything special, except open and shut those vents, and we never had any mold or anything else.
The map showed a stream about 3 houses down the street, but no provision seems to have been made for it by the builder(s), and the two or three times I walked down to that back yard, it was always soaking wet. Their crawl space must have been like a pond.
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