Squirrels

Here's a little something that may make you laugh and we've been dealing with over the past two weeks:

We have squirrels that are residing in the walls of our *rental* home.

You read that right. Giant, fluffy, gnawing, grey squirrels have chewed or clawed through the roofing in this house and made their way in our HVAC system. There's really no danger of them getting out, this I am sure of. Well, I'm sure there's a small danger but very, very unlikely.

So when you have giant squirrels sharing your residence, that you RENT by the way, you let your landlord know, right? And you'd think that the landlord would first be concerned about your safety and secondly be concerned about his financial investment in the residence and said landlord would send a specialist out as soon as possible to fix and remove vermin from the home. Right? Am I being unreasonable here?

Apparently I am. Because it will be 2 weeks tomorrow(Friday) since we first notified our landlord of this problem. They send a maintenance man out that following Monday who slapped some sheet metal on the roof and told me he'd be back the next day to place traps down. Well, it snowed and he never showed up. When I called him 2 days later he told me he had "lost his trap" and was searching for it. In the meantime the squirrels have gnawed a new hole in the roof and now we've had another snow storm which means that even IF he finds his stupid trap he won't be able to place the trap as he'll have to get on the roof to do so and we have 9 inches of snow that ain't gonna melt any time soon.

So now we're going on 2 weeks since we notified landlord of the problem and over one week since we've spoke to the maintenance man about coming back out.

I refuse to call our landlord again as I feel like I'm treated like I'm the hysterical crazy woman with squirrels in the house. Alan has called twice with no return call and we refuse to pay out of pocket to remove the squirrels.

We'll be sending a certified letter on Monday just stating the problem in writing so that when we move out in July (hopefully!) it won't be turned back around on us.

I'm totally at the end of my rope on this and I know that while there are definitely good landlord/tenant relationships we are not lucky enough to have one and I am hopeful that I'll never have to rent a house again in my life.