Rodent Removal in Mission Hills

A Mission Hills house built between 1908 and 1930 gives a roof rat a way in at the top of the wall and another at the bottom. At the top, the Craftsman and Prairie houses run open eaves with exposed rafter tails, and the Spanish Colonial Revival houses carry clay tile with a gap under the first course wherever the bird stop is missing or broken. At the bottom, the raised foundation that most of these houses sit on has a line of foundation vents around the crawl space, and a vent screen that has rusted or been pushed in by a garden hose is an opening a rat walks through.

The two levels are connected inside the house. A rat that enters the crawl space follows the plumbing and the wall cavities up to the attic, and one that enters at the eave comes down the same route to the kitchen. An inspection here covers both. The contractor we route walks the sill line with a light and then the roofline with a ladder, and lists every opening found at each level before quoting. Roof rat removal in Mission Hills starts with that list.

Mission Hills sits on the hills just south of the San Diego River valley and is cut by finger canyons, two of which are public trail canyons, and the wet canyon bottom is permanent roof rat habitat. A house on a rim has that habitat at the foot of its own back slope, and the slope is usually planted with ivy, iceplant and the mature trees that give the lot its view. Roof rats climb instead of burrowing, which the County of San Diego Vector Control states plainly, and the ivy on a slope is the cover they move under. From the slope they reach a fence, a citrus tree or a palm with an untrimmed skirt of dead fronds, and from there the roofline.

The 1950s and 1960s modern houses built as infill along these rims have flat or low-pitched roofs and a lot of glass, and they get rats the same way the older houses do, along a branch or a wire to the edge of the roof. Removing the bridge helps and it is the least of the job, since a roof rat forages within roughly 150 yards of its nest by the University of Florida extension's figure, and 150 yards from a canyon bottom reaches every house on the rim. The building has to be closed with metal, which is what rodent exclusion means on a canyon lot.

Many Mission Hills houses fall inside the Mission Hills Historic District or the Fort Stockton Line Historic District, and the sealing on those houses is done from behind and below so the street elevation stays as it was. Open rafter tails get quarter-inch hardware cloth fitted in the bays between them from the attic side, cut to the shape of each bay. A clay tile eave gets a metal bird stop under the first course, which is a manufactured building part that the US Department of Energy names among its recommended tile roof measures, and it sits under the tile out of sight. Foundation vents get new screen in the same frame. Nothing is foamed, because foam is chewed through and it looks wrong on a house of this age.

The county recommends quarter-inch hardware cloth in 18 to 22 gauge and metal weather stripping for rodent sealing, and that is the material list the contractor we route works from on a historic house. The attic gets attention once the sealing is done. An attic that has carried rats for a season has droppings along the top plates and often urine-soaked insulation above the bedrooms, and attic cleanup is priced as its own line on the quote so the homeowner can decide on it separately. The weeks of lying awake tracking footsteps across the ceiling end when the metal goes on; the contact page or the phone, answered 24 hours a day, is where that begins.