Ants!
Week 25, day 172. The chaos never ends.
At some point recently, Anne heard noises in the bedroom as we were falling asleep. I’m honestly not sure when that was. Given our lives right now, the days all run together and nothing is certain anymore, but it happened.
Those noises sounded like someone crinkling candy wrappers down the hall or perhaps in another room, maybe behind a closed door.
I couldn’t hear this. My ears are terrible, like the rest of my body.
Initially she attributed the sound to me making noises as I moved around on the mattress, but when I got up and it continued, it became clear that wasn’t the case. Eventually she pointed at the ceiling and said it was coming from up there. And if I put my ear right up against the ceiling (or wall), I could just barely hear it too.
If that was all we knew, we’d have thought “termites,” but apparently those are not a problem here in BC. What we do have are carpenter ants, and we have seen those on the side of the house at various times. Not too many, but enough to make us wonder.
Now, you might be asking about the photo above. It’s the early version of the exploration for the problem. Thankfully we have contractors here already, and from them we have learned that most of a house can be removed and replaced as needed in order to solve problems. The only issues are cost and time.
Since the problem was originally heard in the ceiling of the upstairs bedroom, the first thing they did was cut open the roof. A fairly large hole eventually revealed about half the colony, which was sprayed and removed. Then they turned to the exterior and opened up what you see above. In there they found the other half of the colony, which was also sprayed and vacuumed out.
To be sure they got it all, they opened up more of that portion of the side of the house, checking below and around the opening shown above to find any other issues, but nothing turned up. So they put it all back together and called it good. It still needs paint, but it’s sealed up, which is a good thing because it is raining.
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We also have an appointment with a pest control company in the coming week to look into regular exterior treatments to keep this from happening again. We don’t need carpenter ants keeping Anne awake.
In hindsight, it’s a good thing we had people here already that knew how to deal with this. An exterminator would offer to drill holes into the siding and spray something in there, but I don’t think they could have dealt with the roof without coming inside to do the same, and they wouldn’t have repaired the damaged wood. We are far better off with what we did.
But we really didn’t need this. Not in the least. It set us back two or three days in the end.
In other news, the floor is going in. It started on Wednesday (delayed by two days because the job our floor installer was working on before ours added a bunch of stairs to what they wanted done), and good progress has already been made. He says he will finish tomorrow, and I believe him.
Later today should see the installation of the retaining wall in our backyard, which is a big step towards getting that part of the project finished up. But it is a long weekend here (it’s Victoria Day), so at least one of our contractors is off with the family until Tuesday.
Finally, there was some actual entertainment this week. Anne is playing cello in a pit orchestra for a performance titled Magic Flute Reimagined, and I went to opening night.
I’ve never seen Mozart’s original, but this was clearly not quite that. It’s in English, for starters, and the plot is heavily revised. The Queen of the Night is the CEO of Night Tech, a burgeoning tech monopoly. Her daughter, Pamina, is employed at DAY (Digital Access for You!), a nonprofit providing digital services to everyone. The prince from the original, Tamino, is a young man who just arrived in Vancouver, looking to make his mark on the world. The three attendants to the Queen of the Night are transformed into executive assistants. Papageno is a local inventor, selling his inventions to Night Tech for a fraction of their value, and so on. It gets even weirder, in fact. The flute is replaced with a bass guitar, which Tamino actually plays (quite well). As far as I know, the music is essentially the original, though the instrumentation varies.
It was fun. At one point, Papageno actually says, “No one goes to see The Magic Flute for the plot.” That tells you quite a bit about the show, really.
That winds things up.
Next week the floor will be fully installed, so there will be pictures of that. And if it stops raining, I will include photos of the patched exterior of the house so you can see how far the ant-caused demolition went. And of course I’ll document anything else that gets accomplished as well.
Take care, and may your pest problems be small!
