These rats are driving me Craaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy!!!

They're living in my ceiling and keeping me up all night, scratching, running, jumping, gnawing :o and the real estate are taking their fine time doing anything about it, meanwhile i'm getting a bit irrational, terrified they'll get in the house and scurry across my bed during the night! or worse chew through wires and start a fire ahhhhh!

Going a bit bonkers sorry just needed to vent somewhere!

I feel so helpless :( especially because our roof has no manhole so I can't even put traps up there in the mean time, short of getting on the roof and getting in there or whatever (well beyond my capabilities!)

yuck
yuck
yuck

have you got a cat?

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have you got a cat?

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I do, they're driving her nuts too!

We have the same issue with possums. And they also die up there stinking the whole house out ewwwww! Our land lords say we just have to live with them... they are not going to do anything about it... oh well, we're out of here soon... we paid minimal rent for an otehrwise great BIG house so i guess you have to take the good with the bad.

If you're close to Bunnings, buy some "Tomcat" Rat Baits. They are in blocks and pretty cheap.
The next problem is finding a way to get the baits in the roof. If the rats can get in there I'm sure there is a way.
Alternatively, if you have a spare $120-$160 you can call someone out and get reimbursed from the realestate.

Hope they go away ASAP!

We had the same problem only 2 weeks ago, except they got into the house! It scared the living daylights out of me. We eventually caught them with rat traps. Hope you can find a way to get rid of them soon.

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We had the same problem only 2 weeks ago, except they got into the house! It scared the living daylights out of me. We eventually caught them with rat traps. Hope you can find a way to get rid of them soon.

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Oh my god, you saw one? Eeeek! I actually just found a dropping in our wardrobe *hyperventilates*


Oh and bathsheba that is appalling! Renting sucks hey?

yep, in our wardrobe as well! Because we knew where it was, we set 2 traps in the wardrobe, one on each end, and it was caught about 15 minutes later.

One morning DH woke me up and said "there's something in the wardrobe... it's an animal..." meaning because i grew up on farms I had to do the checking and sure enough there was a possum perched on the shelf above my dresses. I ordered DH to open the front door (our bedroom is nearby) and i just grabbed the thing and marched it straight out! If anyone had been passing by our house (it was at about 5.30am) they would have witnessed a mildly amusing vision of me looking quite p*ssed off in my jimmy jams launching a possum out the front door onto the verander! Fortunately i didn't sustain any scratches. DH was very grateful and retold the story to an awestruck female league of office assistants at work the next day. I felt more useful than i had in years... probably on par to giving birth! But possums don't bother me too much, they are quite endearing really. rats? not so endearing...

Renting? For us it's been great, all things considered. Better than home ownership in that we have been able to live for 7 blissfully quiet (great neighbours) in a very large house on a very large block of land very close to the CBD.... totally un-doable on a single income... but now we want a real country experience... a bit more than finding possums in the house ;)

When I lived in sydney we had a rat problem...and they werent normal rats... they were big ****off bush rats!! and no matter what we did they just bread and there was more of them. They ate THROUGH a plastic tub (about 1cm thick) to get at the rabbit food....which they half ate and left, so I put rat poision in it....didn't kill them...

when they started eating my books on my book shelf I had had enough...

Contact your local council. If rats are prevalent in your area, they may have a program where a council person comes out and puts traps or baits or whatever in the roof for you, because they understand how difficult this is for many homeowners. Otherwise if you're renting get the landlord's help with it.

*sigh* they've had babies now.

Oh no!!!!!! Are they still only in the ceiling?

We had birds in our ceiling - sounds the same as rats I imagine, scrabbing feet running across the ceiling. Except birds tweet ...

So our poor cat is down below going crazy trying to get them, climbing on top of the cupboard and yowling, which isn't helpful when you've got scrabbling birds AND a yowling cat at 5am.

We got out the 5m ladder (high ceilings) and stuck it in the manhole and shoved the cat up there. Cat had the best time of her entire life and only came down when she needed a drink.

The result? Henceforth, the cat would go to extreme lengths to get in the roof, including climbing up the ladder every time we left it leaning in the corner. The cat drove us mad doing that far longer than the wildlife in the roof did.

http://giraffian.com/files/images/ca...IN.preview.jpg

That link goes to a photo of our cat jumping into the roof. The scale is hard to see - the scaffold is 6' high, there's another 6' above the scaffold to the ceiling. The light shining through there is the cornice missing and is not a large gap, so basically the cat jumped 6 feet vertically into a 3 inch wide hole.

That extremely dirty cornice-installer is my other half, when we were building the baby (now a toddler) a new room :)

If you can, put some bait under the house as this will kill them. They have to come down to get water.