If you remember, one of the first things we did at the house was have the floors redone. This included removing tile that had been put down in the main hallway. Without the tile, the floor level dropped about an inch, leaving the baseboards dangling. So we pulled them off, and have been touching up the plaster and paint, so we can reattached the boards at the new lower level.

So… when Heidi was scraping the wall by the stairs, she noticed a smell. “Noticed” might be an understatement. “Was assaulted by” is probably closer to the truth. So much so that she ended up digging into the stairs. She was quite certain one of the cats had been doing foul things at the foot of the stairs. But what she found was not quite what she expected.

The first tragic thought was that this was someone’s former pet cat. I mean… look at it. But after getting it out, it was quite obviously a rat. (A big one). And a whole lot rat feces. So friday night became “Clean and scour under the stairs” night. Several days later, and several types of smell abatement treatments, and life on the stairs is much more bearable.