I’m here today to tell you the tale of how we blew $1,200 on ourselves.
And it will be totally worth it.
We moved into our house basically on New Years Day 2009, a year before our house’s 150th birthday. Though about half of the house had been totally remodeled and beautiful, there were rooms that needed a lot of work. Mostly it was the upstairs bathroom. The sink wasn’t hooked up, the floor tile was in pieces, there was a wall missing, ceiling bowed out.
It was a bare room without lights. Fine to use during the day, but creepy to use at night. Most disturbingly was the one night when Marge went to the bathroom and heard a chirping in the top corner of the room. It was dark, only lit by moonlight, but she could tell that there was an animal in there that wasn’t happy with her presence. She was pretty sure it was a bat.
Well, we fixed up the bathroom and put in a new wall and fixtures. All nice and new! And all goes quiet for a while. A year, in fact. Then in the middle of the night, we are woken up by Maeby pacing around the bedroom. Luckily, she woke us up. In the dark we could make out…
there was a bat flying around the bedroom!
We covered ourselves with blankets and scrambled out of the room! But Maeby was still in there! I opened the door and yelled for Maeby to “Get out! Get out of there!” as the bat continued to fly around.
Did you hear something?
We slammed the door, but now the bat was stuck in our bedroom. Eventually, I worked up the courage to cover myself with a blanket, crawl on the floor as if under enemy fire and open the window screen so the bat could fly out. I think I even felt the bat’s wing flick against the blanket at one point. EWW!
The next day, I actually left work early so I could work around the house sealing holes. After reading that once bats are in your house, they’re in there, I did not want a re-occurrence of the night before! At that point, we didn’t know how it got into the house. Upstairs? Downstairs? So I went into every room, caulking and foaming up every spot I could find. Bats can get in through holes as small as ¼”, don’tcha know.
That seemed to work for a while, but oh was I wrong. Here’s the horrifying run-down of some subsequent bat run-ins:
The 2010 Vancouver Olympics: Marge and I were sat down to watch the Olympics (hopefully curling!) when suddenly a bat came flying down the stairs and around the dining room! It was terrifying! We panicked and tried to crawl under the bat’s flight pattern to the back door, which we then left open for the bat to fly out.
The family: I can’t even remember how we came upon this situation, but we went upstairs, and there were three bats flying around! Trust me, if you saw this, your eyes would be popping out of your head and you’d be stuttering “Buh-buh-buh-baaats!”
B-B-Bats!
We felt bad because one was obviously larger than the other two, meaning it was probably a mother with two babies. We ran outside and opened the back door. It was twilight, and we could definitely tell that two left, but couldn’t be sure if all three were out. We didn’t see any more flying around indoors, so we went back upstairs to bed…
The leftover: I still had a funny feeling the next day that there was another bat inside, even though we didn’t see it all day. So the next night we went outside again, opened the back door and waited. Lo and behold, at dusk, the last bat flew out the back door. It had been living in there all day.
The sleepy one: Whenever a bat shows up at night and we leave the door open for it, it can be difficult to tell when or if it’s left. You have to stand outside and constantly keep your eye on the door. Look away for a second and you could miss it. In this instance, we didn’t see it fly out, but we also didn’t see it flying around inside the house anymore. So we went inside to sleep. The next morning, Marge found the bat sleeping on top of the window sill!
A bat sleeping in my house? I give it my mad dog face.
“It’s kind of cute,” she said, which I doubted. We had to get it out of there, so we came up with a very inventive procedure that involved both of us wearing gloves, putting a piece of Tupperware over the bat and slipping a piece of cardboard behind it. It worked okay, but the bat semi-woke up and hissed at us!!
It bared its sharp little teeth and Marge agreed that, at that moment, it wasn’t cute anymore. It was pretty much terrifying. But we closed him into the box where he continued to sleep and we left him in the grass outside. I don’t know, what are you supposed to do with a sleeping bat?
Nighttime scares: We had a run of a few times where Margie would wake up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom, and then I’d hear screaming as she encounters a bat along the way. Commence the run outside in pajamas (or less) door opening and waiting for it to fly out.
Aside from the fact that they’re terrifying, it’s dangerous to have a bat flying around in the house. We keep reading that, if you find a bat in a room with a sleeping person, that person should be checked for rabies. Reason being that they could’ve been bitten by the bat. Not sure how that could happen without the sleeping person WAKING UP, but I suppose it does.
The Last Straw:
Usually, we don’t have to be worried about bats until July. At that point, we start creating the BFZ, the Bat-Free Zone upstairs. By selectively closing off rooms, we can manage to keep any bats that enter the house contained to the bathroom, hallway and library, since they always enter somehow in one of those rooms.
We had a very early hot streak here in upstate NY. In mid-May, it nearly hit 90 and tied some records. Since it was May, we hadn’t set up the BFZ yet, and while I was sitting in bed using Screeny the Tablet, once again a bat came flying into the bedroom! Just like the first time, we ran downstairs, opened the back door and waited.
At that moment I decided this was going to be the last time.
The next day, it turned out that the bat never even left the house that night. Because look what we found the next morning hanging from the crown moulding in the library:
Bat sleeping in the library
Each one of these incidents ends up with me struggling to figure out where the bats are entering the interior of our home. Most likely it’s the space behind the cast iron radiator that is impossible to reach. So I am basically at a loss for sealing up the home from the inside, unless we move the radiator to fix the wall. That’s not happening, and there’s no assurance it would work. It’s not good to have bats living in the walls anyway. The only thing to do now is seal up the outside of the house which means…
Calling in the Bat Man
Yes, we hired a guy. If I decided to tackle the bat eradification on my own, I just know it’d be the same thing all over again. First, I’d need a much bigger ladder, since our house is two stories tall with a flat roof. Then I’d try to seal up all the gaps without really knowing what I’m looking at. And then we’d probably still end up with bats in the house.
Hiring an expert means it finally gets done. He’s seen everything, so he knows what to look for. The day this post goes up is the day he should be coming back to seal all the holes and install the one-way bat boxes that let the critters fly out, but not back in. He also gives a three year warrantee.
We had to wait two weeks before he had a spot on his schedule, and in the meantime, it’s happened again and again. Look what was waiting in our bathroom one morning!
Bat sleeping in the bathroom
I have to say, it’s basically a quality of life issue at this point. Each year, the first bat incident usually marks the beginning of our bat scare season, where we are hesitant to walk upstairs to the bedroom at night if the lights aren’t on since we basically expect a bat to be flying around. Even though it only happens a few times a year, we shouldn’t have to walk around our house at night scared that a bat will hit one of us in the face or bite our dog. If I think about that $1,200 and what it will do for my life at this point, it seems like money well spent.
Of course, there’s also an un-frugal way of dealing with bats. Our bat man told us that he does a lot of bat removals from people’s houses. That is, there’s a bat in the house! Call someone to get rid of it! He has people who call him repeatedly to remove the bats. He tries to tell them that this problem could be solved by paying for the full bat exclusion, but they don’t listen to him. This is dumb for two reasons:
- You can deal with the bat yourself. Yes, it’s scary, but you can open a window or a door, right? Do that, leave the area, and hopefully, it will fly out on its own. Don’t call up poor bat man at midnight and make him drive out there to deal with it.
- If it’s repeatedly a problem, this comes down to the old Repeat Expense Vs. One-Time Expense conundrum. If it just happens once, okay. But if the bats keep getting in, and you are so short-sighted that you don’t see the repeated expenses of having the bat professionally removed each time totaling up, you will end up spending way more money than if you had just done the bat exclusion and done away with the problem for good.