The Bat Saga

Oh, Gosh!!  Where do I even begin with this one????  Ordinarily I only do blog posts once a year in January where I do our Davis Family Year in Review.  However, I felt like this blog post needed to be made.  

I've posted about the Bat Saga a few times on Facebook, but I figured that I would pull together all of my photos and do an in depth special blog post dedicated solely to this Bat Saga, so.......

Come sit right back and I'll tell you a tale......

Our story begins at the end of January.  Because of a job layoff and an ever mounting pile of medical bills, our house payment was crushing us, and so we made the agonizing decision to move.  We found what we thought was a lovely house in Kaysville, which will now and forever be called "the Bat House!"  This house is directly behind Davis High School and the Davis Technical school.  

From what we have found out, the owners of the house bought it around 15 years ago.  During that time, they added a sunroom off of the back of the house.  The husband passed away several years previously, and the wife continued to live in the house until recently when she could no longer live on her own, so her family moved her into a care facility and decided to rent out the house.  About 20 years ago Davis High School was renovated, and as with most old buildings, especially schools, it had bats residing in it.  So, when the high school got renovated, the bats had to find a new home.  I bet you can't guess where they came to live!  In talking with several neighbors on our street, we came to find out that quite a few of them have had bat problems as well, although I don't think their bat problems were as bad as this one.  

As with all of my blog posts, I like to tell the story with pictures, this will be no different, and this time you will get to see my questionable art skills at work.  I drew these first four pictures so that whoever reads this blog post can refer back to them to hopefully give them an idea of what is going on and to be able to understand what I am explaining in my story.

Picture #1....

This is the layout of the main level of the Bat House.  

Picture #2....

Told you my art skills were questionable.  This is my "artistic" rendering of the outside of the back of the house.

Picture #3....

In this viewpoint I attempted to draw it is as if you are standing in the Living Room, looking at the fireplace.  This is where all the trouble was hiding.

  Picture #4....

I tried to make this picture a more close-up view of the two rooms that our story is about.  I will go into more detail as the story progresses, but #1 is where the first bat was found.  #2.  Is where a ton of bat poop and 6 bat bodies were found.  #3. More bat poop was found there too.  #4. I think more bat poop is here.

 Nathan and I had decided that we would use the sunroom as our office/craft room.  I decided to take the corner over by the alcove.  Why there was an alcove and the reasoning behind it was a complete mystery to us because there wasn't any real reason why there needed to be an alcove.  It wasn't really big enough to be useful for anything.  It is too deep and skinny to make shelving useful, and the ceiling slants with the eaves.  Basically it's wasted space.  But, me, being the inventive person that I am figured I could get some shelves and put them on rollers.  Then I could put my crafting stuff on the shelves, and whenever I needed something, I could just roll the shelves out.  I did some measuring and got the shelves and the rollers ordered.  They never got used, as a matter of fact, they are still in their boxes.  Because the sunroom was an add on, and it was well, a sunroom, there wasn't any heating or air conditioning to it, but we figured that wouldn't be a problem because we had an awesome floor unit that doubled as an air conditioner and heater.  We had it for our massive room in our Layton house because it didn't have air conditioning.

Our official moving day was May 24th.  May 24th was also the warmest day of the year, to that point. It was early in the afternoon, and the rays of the sun were just starting to really beat down on the backside of the house, and I was sitting at my desk, working on unpacking things.  As I was unpacking, I started to smell something that smelled a lot like cat pee.  It was faint at first, and it would come and go.  Now, as you all know, I have cats.  However, we had not moved my cats to the house yet, they were still at the Layton house, and they wouldn't be moved over to this house for another day.  At the Layton house, I had this neat alcove where I stored my craft stuff, and the cats loved to go up in there and hide.  So, naturally, at first, I was concerned that the cats might have peed on my stuff up in that alcove.  One quick sniff test of everything disproved that idea.  None of my stuff smelled like cat pee, but yet there was still a smell of pee, and as the day got warmer, and warmer, and as the sun beat more and more on the back side of the house, the smell got stronger and stronger.  We moved every last bit of my craft stuff, still packed, out into the kitchen (where it would remain, and never get unpacked).  However, the smell was still there, still getting stronger, but still coming and going.  The only logical conclusion was that the smell was coming from that alcove.  I stuck my head into the alcove and quickly found the source of the smell.  We figured that the owners had a pet, and that pet had used the alcove as a bathroom, so naturally I looked at the baseboards....

And found some suspicious stains that looked a lot like an animal was using it as a restroom.

We immediately contacted the rental company and asked them if the owners had a pet, and explained the smell and the stains on the baseboards.  We were told that the owners had never had a pet of any kind, EVER!!  No pets had EVER been in the house.  Then we were told that it was probably our cats that were doing it.  ????? really???  My cats???  That would be a pretty amazing feat since they weren't there.  We let them know that it wasn't my cats because the cats hadn't been brought to the house yet.  So, if the owners never had pets, and it wasn't physically possible for it to be my cats, what the heck?!?!  My only conclusion was that if it isn't animal, then it must be human.  The logic behind that lead me to think that the owners probably had grandchildren, possibly even grandsons.  Before you come at me for saying that, what conclusion would you have come to given the circumstances??

By now, the sunroom is warming up enough to need to turn on the air conditioner.  Within seconds of turning on the machine, the pee smell increased.  It became so bad that you LITERALLY COULD NOT BREATHE, and it made your eyes burn.  We had to quickly turn off the air conditioner, open the windows, and evacuate the room.  That left us scratching our heads and wondering if the cats had peed on the air conditioning unit, but that was silly because we had used it at the Layton house and it certainly did not produce a smell like that.  With the windows open, and the air conditioning unit off, the smell died down to the point that we could be in the room.  To be safe, we pulled out all of the filters and replaced them, and cleaned the unit really well.  When we turned it on again, the same thing happened.  Another message was sent to the rental company explaining what was going on and our wondering if some small child had been using that alcove as a potty.  I have not see the texts, back and forth between Nathan and the rental company, but Nathan has told me that their response was to just blame my cats (and from what Nathan had told me, they blamed my cats several more times before they finally sent someone out to investigate our complaints).  See, while our big move in date was on May 24th, we had actually signed the lease at the beginning of March and the adult children had moved in, and Nathan moved his office over and had been using the sunroom the whole time.  I, Meow-meow, and the cats remained living in the Layton house as I was recovering from some major surgeries and we didn't want to have to make Meow-meow move schools so late in the year.  Nathan would come over to the house and work during the day, and come home to the Layton house in the evening.  The plan was to then make the big and final move on May 24th.  Nathan had made sure that the rental people knew this plan, but with us complaining about a cat pee smell, I think they forgot that we had explicitly told them that the cats wouldn't be moving in until May 24th.  

Now, you may be thinking that if the adult kids had been living here and Nathan was in the sunroom during the day, why didn't anyone smell anything sooner?  Well, the smell didn't go down to the basement where the kids were living.  It also was still quite cold outside and the sun didn't heat up the backside of the house like it can in warmer weather.  Nathan's part of the office was on the other side of the room, where the smell didn't waft over to.  He also didn't turn on the heating part of the air conditioning/heating unit because it didn't get cold enough for him to need to use the heater because, he, unlike me, can tolerate cold.

And with that, the unpacking of the sunroom came to a complete and total standstill.  I moved into the Living Room to start unpacking my knick-knacks into my china cabinets.  Before I go further, scroll up to Picture #4 and look at the location of circle #3.  I had one of my china cabinets in this corner, and I was working on putting things away in it, when again, I got a whiff of the pee.  Again, it was mild, and it would come and go.  This was the beginning of what we came to call the house gaslighting us. There were times when I could smell it, but Nathan couldn't.  Then there would be times where he could smell it, but I couldn't.  Then, we started smelling it in other areas of the house, and again sometimes I would smell it and Nathan couldn't and visa versa.  Then there were times when we both could smell it.  Then the kids started smelling it.  We all kind of felt like we were going crazy.  Then, if we would go outside, we would catch wafts of it.  You could be in the driveway and get a smell of it.  Another complaint was made to the rental company, cats were blamed, rinse and repeat.

As May ended and June began and the days kept getting warmer, the smell kept getting worse.  We could not use the air conditioning in the office, which effectively made the sunroom useless to us as an office.  We could work in there until it started getting too warm.  We practically had the windows open all the time to try and keep it cool, but that only worked until the sun came over the house and started to heat things up.  Any time we tried to turn on the air conditioner, the smell would knock you over.  That one corner of the Living Room stank, and the house was gaslighting us with the smell popping up in random places at random times, and we had no idea what was causing the smell, other than the theory that the owners had some grandsons who peed in the corner of the Living Room and the alcove in the Sunroom.  And that's when I started to notice tons and tons and tons and TONS of fruit flies all congregating in the corner of the ceiling on my side of the office, (between the two windows.  See picture #4 for reference).

Finally, after enough complaining, the rental company sent someone out to look at what was going on.  The guy listened to our complaints, we showed him where the problem spots were, we turned on the air conditioning unit for him, he popped his head up into the attic, and walked around the house.  His final conclusion was that we had squirrels in the attic.  Then he left.  We ordered a Squirrel trap.  We caught zero squirrels.  If we had a squirrel problem, they were sneaky buggers because I never saw any of them running along the fence.  I was constantly seeing squirrels at the Layton house.  I thought that surely if we had a squirrel problem big enough to cause the smell were were suffering through that I would be seeing squirrels running all over the place......Crickets on the squirrel front.  

We kept on complaining to the rental company.  Meanwhile, I had the Living Room all unpacked and looking nice, but once afternoon hit, you really didn't want to be in there.  All of my craft stuff was still unpacked and in the kitchen, I was recovering from a shoulder surgery, and so unpacking came to a stand-still.  Then, two of the adult children told us that they could hear the squirrels, or mice, or whatever it was in the walls in the Living Room.  These two children liked to stay up late, and the noise wouldn't start until well after dark which is long after Nathan and I had gone to bed.  Then, one evening, Jacen took some garbage outside, and as he was walking back into the house, via the door to the basement in the back yard (see picture #2 for reference), he heard the racket and took a video of it.  Nathan and I then stayed up late to hear the noise for ourselves.  Sure enough, once it was dark, there was a massive noise coming from inside the walls in the Living Room.  We did some investigating outside the house and found tons of what looked like mouse poop all over the wall (see picture #2 for reference. The poop was all over the walls, and there is a little ledge where the brick meets the cement foundation, and the poop was just piled up on this ledge). Another complaint went to the rental company.

I don't have a picture of all the poop, but in our investigating, we saw this gap between the brick surrounding the chimney and the wall to the house.  All the poop, and all of that black staining we would soon find was from bats.

The rental company sent someone out again to investigate our newest complaints (we sent them the picture from above and the video that Jacen had made).  The guy got up on the ladder and made this discovery....

BATS!!  Yes, those are bats.  That is that gap from the previous picture.  There was also more than one bat up in there.

And that is when we found out that it was bats.  VINDICATION!!  I had no idea it was bats, but I KNEW it wasn't my cats!!  It was a relief to finally have some answers, but now we had to deal with the situation.  The guy went and got some foam sealing spray, then walked around the house spraying any openings he could find that a bat could use to get into the attic.  He did this during the day while they were sleeping.  Then we waited.  Meanwhile, the owners had to find someone to come out and deal with the situation.  You see, bats pose a major health risk, especially to those who are immunocompromised.  Guess what?!?! I am immunocompromised.  I've got chronic health problems, and at the same time was recovering from a hysterectomy, a failed spinal cord stimulator test trial surgery, and a shoulder surgery, so I already wasn't feeling well, which, unfortunately, made it easy to miss that I was also starting to get daily headaches (I don't get headaches) and constant mild cold symptoms (I also DO NOT have seasonal allergies).  Bat guano can cause histoplasmosis.  What is histoplasmosis? It is a fungal infection that can be caused by bat guano.  The symptoms are cold and flu like symptoms.  Most people don't get affected by it, but people with autoimmune issues can be very susceptible to it.  I was recently tested for it, and it came back negative.  Yet, I've had constant symptoms of histoplasmosis for several months now.  Last year I was diagnosed with CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome), but that doctor almost killed me and is the reason why I had a mini-stroke, so I brushed off his diagnosis of CIRS.  Now I am wondering if he was at least correct on that part.  In either case, this is NOT a good living situation for me.

While we were waiting for the bats to all die and decompose a bit, the owners were searching around for a company to come in and clean up the mess.  They settled on Utah Disaster Kleenup.  They were over at our house so much over the course of the summer, that we felt like they were just part of the family.  

Meanwhile, we still couldn't use the sunroom past 11 am, and you ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT turn on the air conditioner....

Our solution was to tape off the alcove and hope for the best.  We discovered something interesting.  Whenever your turned on the air conditioner, it would blow out the plastic. That told us that there was negative pressure somewhere in the alcove that was drawing the stinky air from wherever it was right into the sunroom.  By the way, the plastic did nothing to stop the smell, and we still could not turn on the air conditioner.

Before Utah Disaster Kleenup could begin work, they needed access to the Living Room, which meant that I had to pack up all of the stuff that I had just recently unpacked, and it all went downstairs.  Unpacking, REALLY came to a standstill at that point.  You can't unpack the basement and put stuff away when you can't unpack your Living Room. 

The first thing they did was to tear out the section of the wall where we heard all the noises.  I thought for sure that they would find the bats and bat poop.  Nothing.

So, they tore out that section of the wall and a large chunk of the ceiling.  Then they went into my office and tore out the ceiling in the alcove and a large part of the ceiling above my desk.  They also removed the insulation.  The supervisor for Disaster Kleenup was there on the first morning, but had to leave to finish another job, so it was just one worker who did this part.  Now, you can see the brick in this picture but that is because the guy had to tear out what I found out is called the sheathing (basically the boards they nail to the exterior of your house before they put on the siding, or in this case brick).  As the guy was wrapping up and leaving for the day, I asked him if he had found any bats.  He said he found no sign of bats, nor any bat poop anywhere in the Living Room nor my side of the office.  He did say that it smelled really strongly of cat pee, and that it was probably due to my cat.  That did NOT go over well with me.  He did say that he found a mole in the ceiling in my office, which was the cause of all the fruit flies.

The next day, when they came back, the supervisor was there for the day.  He apologized for his employee blaming my cat and assured us that he made sure that he knew that we were dealing with a bat problem.  He also said that because of the language barrier, it wasn't a mole in the ceiling in my office, but a mouse.  They then set to work at tearing out the fireplace.  What they found will forever haunt me.

This is what they found behind the rock they tore out.  That beam was crumbling in their hands from all of the years of bat pee and poop.  All of that stuff on the blocks?  That's piles of bat poop.  In that bottom left corner, you can see piles of bat poop.

Bat poop is about the size of a grain of rice.  There was massive amounts of bat poop all in the cracks of those bricks.

They said that in some places, there were piles of bat poop 4 inches high.  They did not find any bat bodies.

We still couldn't use the sunroom past 11 am, and you still ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT turn on the air conditioner....

They tore everything out, sprayed it down with all of their cleaning chemicals, and then painted it with the Kilz paint.  This isn't the first bat rodeo that Utah Disaster Kleenup has dealt with, the chemicals they use do work, and the Kilz paint really does get rid of smells (we used Kilz paint in our Layton house to get rid of the smell of cigarette smoke).  The smell should have been gone.  The next step should have been to do the construction and put it all back together so we could unpack and settle into the house.  If that were the case, I wouldn't be making this blog post, now would I?  Oh, and this picture was taken on July 31st.  This whole fiasco started on May 24th.  It's now been TWO months of this mess.  Oh, and that's a gas fireplace by the way.

Did Utah Disaster Kleenup do a good job?  They thought they had.  As a matter of fact, they thought the problem was solved and the job was over.  The construction people were being scheduled to come in.  The problem was that the smell DID NOT go away, if anything, it got worse.  I did some exploring and discovered....

There was piles of bat poop that didn't get cleaned up, and just got sprayed over with Kilz paint.  Also there was TONS of those little grains of rice sized poop all in the cracks of the bricks.

Then, as I was investigating the walls and finding piles of poop like in the picture above, I noticed that there was a gap between the framing of the house and the brick wall.  This gap went down into the basement, like down to the foundation.  I ordered one of those snake camera things that can hook up to your phone and stuck it down into the that gap....

I know it's kind of blurry, but that's all bat poop.

Tons and tons and tons and tons of bat poop piled up.  Now the question was what to do next.  Does this mean we have to start tearing out the rock fireplace in the basement?  Utah Disaster Kleenup was sent back out.  They cleaned out that gap the best they could.  They sprayed it down with all of their cleaning stuff, and sprayed it full of Kilz paint, and then they sealed it up with foam sealant.  

While they were cleaning up the latest round of bat poop discoveries, the supervisor from Utah Disaster Kleenup did some investigating in the alcove.  He stuck his head up into the rafters and was able to look directly into the Living Room.  We found our negative pressure.  When they added on the sunroom, they did not seal it off from the rest of the house.  That meant that whenever we turned on the air conditioner, the negative pressure would suck all of the bat poop smell from the Living Room and bring it right into the sunroom.  So, he decided that he was going to seal it off....

While he was spraying the foam sealant, he found the first bat body!!  After sealing up that area, we were now able to turn on and run the air conditioner, but it was useless to do so because half of the ceiling and insulation was missing.  Every now and then we would catch a whiff of the smell, but it would go away.  Problem solved!!

Except it wasn't.  The smell was still horrible in the rest of the house.  Things got really bad in the afternoon.  The smell would move down the hallway and hang out right in front of our bedroom door.  We felt like prisoners in our home.  You couldn't use the Living Room, at all.  You could be in the sunroom, but only in the morning, and the rest of the time, we had to spend in our bedroom with the door closed.  There's nothing quite like opening your bedroom door and being assaulted by the smell from Hell!! 

Utah Disaster Kleenup came back out and put up some industrial plastic sheeting to block off the fireplace and they put in one of their fancy fans.  They did more chemical treatments, but to no avail because it still did not get rid of the smell.  

There were these gaps on either side of the fireplace.  So, they had the idea to buy some brick and seal those up.  Not sure why the fireplace is so happy.  They got it all bricked up, but the smell didn't go away....

Before they bricked it up, I took some photos, and could see what looked like a massive pile of bat poop behind those cinderblocks.

That's all bat poop.  But they still sealed it off with bricks.  The smell still did not go away.  I kept telling them there was poop back there.  I even showed them the picture.

In the end, they had to tear out all of the brick they had just installed.  This entire cavity was filled to the top with bat poop.  It is also where 6 dead bat bodies were found.  The Utah Disaster Kleenup guy told us that he hauled out OVER 40 POUNDS of bat poop.  Once cleaned out, he scrubbed it out with his special cleaners, and sprayed it down with Kilz paint and then bricked it up and sealed it off.  All in all, over the course of the "clean up", they removed well over 80 POUNDS of bat poop.

He "thoroughly" checked the gap on the other side and said that he didn't see any bat poop over there, so he didn't brick it up and seal it off.  He also went outside and removed the foam from the gap that the bats were using as their entrance to the house and stuck his fancy snake camera into it to see if he could find other sources or pathways and said he couldn't, and that was that, job done.  Except that the house was still not livable.  By this point, it is the BEGINNING of September!!  The house still stinks, nothing they have done has done anything to get rid of the smell, and all of the things they have done to this point SHOULD have gotten rid of the smell.  As I mentioned earlier, the only places of refuge in the house was the sunroom or our bedroom.  It's also hard to fix and eat food when your kitchen smells so bad that you have to try NOT to vomit.  So, in desperation, and on a Sunday of all days, we went to Home Depot and bought some painters plastic and painters tape to try and seal off the Living Room from the rest of the house (see picture #1 for reference on the two areas we had to seal off).  That helped some.  You could now sort of tolerate the rest of the house, but heaven help you if you had to peel back the plastic to access the Living Room, and the smell liked to creep down the hallway and congregate right outside of our bedroom door.  There were daily nasal assaults anytime you opened our bedroom door.

The last resort was to ozone the house.  So, Friday, September 5th, they set up the house to be ozoned, which meant that we had to vacate the house for two days.  Luckily it was the weekend of a home football game and so we went to spend the weekend with my parents.  We had high hopes that this would do the trick.  The thing about the ozone process is that it WILL kill EVERYTHING.  There SHOULD have been ZERO smell.  Guess what?!?!  It didn't work.  That tells us that there is another source somewhere.  Instead of making you scroll back up to the top, I will post picture #4 again, here.

Both Nathan and I think that there is another source behind where #4 is circled.  In order to gain access to where #4 is located, it means that you would have to tear down the entire brick wall to get access to the cement chimney.  That is a lot of money, that is also the exterior to the house, and we found out that none of what had already been done was covered under homeowners insurance.  See, homeowners insurance doesn't cover stuff like damage from bats, which means that the owners have been paying for this all out of pocket.  In order to tear down the brick wall, it would probably cost at a minimum $50,000.00.  I also think there could be another source where #1 is circled.  Remember, that is where the first bat body was discovered.  If there was a bat found clear over there, that means there is bat poop over there. Now the Utah disaster Kleenup guy said he looked into that gap on the other side of the fireplace and didn't find anything, but that doesn't mean that there isn't anything there, he may not have been able to reach the spot.  Facts are facts, and these are the facts: Fact #1. The cleaning chemicals that Utah Disaster Kleenup use usually do get rid of the smell.  Fact #2. Kilz paint does get rid of the smell.  Fact #3. If all else fails, Ozone WILL get rid of the smell.  I do recognize that there is a slight possibility that there isn't another source. Brick is very porous and you are looking at 15 to 20 years of bat damage, and it is possible that the smell has been so soaked up in the brick that nothing short of tearing it down and starting over will get rid of the smell.  Either way, the only way to get rid of the smell is to tear down the brick wall, but that takes money.

With that all said and done, we have now reached October.  Utah Disaster Kleenup have washed their hands of the whole mess, stating that they have done everything they can.  The decision was made to put up insulation and sheetrock and a new fireplace and call it good, meanwhile crossing fingers and hoping against hope that it gets rid of the smell.  Spoiler alert: It doesn't.

If you thought we were done with this story, you would be sorely mistaken.  No offense to whoever the construction people are, but I think they were the cheapest option available because let me tell you, they did some very questionable things. (Hint: don't put anything heavier than a book on the new mantle).

After Utah Disaster Kleenup left the scene, we started asking when the construction company would be coming over.  Crickets.  We asked again.  Crickets.  We finally got word that they would be showing up on October 13th.  

October 13th arrived and it was pushing noon before anyone showed up. I was then told that someone had ordered the wrong fireplace. An electric fireplace had been ordered!! It's a gas fireplace people!! And so I was then told that they would not be starting construction and they were just there to take some measurements, then said they would be back on either Friday or Saturday. Friday came and went, Saturday came and went, Sunday came and went, Monday came and went, and we arrived at Tuesday. It was a little before 9 am when Nathan called to let me know that they had told him that construction would begin!! I waited, and waited and waited and waited, no construction people came. One guy finally showed up at just a little before 11:30. He removed the old framing from around the fireplace and then started hanging sheetrock. It was a 'B' day for the junior high, and on 'B' days, Meow-meow gets out of school early because he does a home gym class, which means I have to pick him up from the school at 1:30. Well, at 1:30 I left to go get Meow-meow, and when I got home, the guy was gone. Three days, THREE DAYS went by and nothing. Nathan called to complain and we were told by the rental company that they would find out the construction crew's schedule and let us know, but we heard NOTHING!! When the guy was here, he dumped a huge stack of sheetrock and 2 x 4's in our driveway. One good rainstorm and it will be ruined, and this was right around the time when we were having all of those epic rainstorms. We had zero clue when they were coming back out. Zero clue when it will be finished. Zero clue on anything. Oh, and putting up the insulation, did nothing to get rid of the smell. By this point I was losing hope that it was ever going to be done, or that the smell would ever go away.

FIVE MONTHS!! We had been dealing with this for FIVE MONTHS to this point!! for FIVE MONTHS I had to deal with zero access to my Living Room, my half of the office was torn apart leaving me unable to access ANY of my craft stuff because it was all in boxes in my KITCHEN!! FIVE MONTHS of breathing in pat poop!! FIVE MONTHS of having to deal with a smell that I can only imagine is what the pits of hell smells like. We were well into October and I was not able to put out any Halloween decorations, and my hopes for being able to decorate for Thanksgiving were dying and I was beginning to wonder if I would even be able to decorate for Christmas. We had reached our breaking point and were starting to talk about the 'M' word. (I have three swear words: Snow, Move, and Winter). That there should tell you something about how bad the situation was, and still IS! Nathan and I had seriously started talking about the 'M' word, and had even gone and looked at a couple of potential houses. We had decided that IF putting up the sheetrock and insulation could get rid of, or significantly tone down the smell, that we could possibly hold out until the end of February when our lease ended and then do a month to month lease until the end of the school year, with the worst case possibility of just moving at the end of February.

Several more days went by without any sign of the construction people and now word on when they would show up. Finally we got word that they would be coming on Friday, October 26th. I'm in the temple on Friday's, so when Nathan picked me up from the temple at 2:30, I asked him if the construction people had come by. The answer was no. We had just barely walked into the house when there was a knock at the door. Low and behold, it was the construction people. They said they were there to do some construction, but not much. They didn't do anything. What they really were there for was to show the sheetrock and framer guy where he was to put up sheetrock and the framing for the new fireplace. I had to remind them that the sunroom still needed insulation and to be sheetrocked as well. They kept forgetting that the sunroom was a part of this whole fiasco. They were also shocked that the insulation guy didn't insulate it. We were then told that the guy would come back on Saturday and SUNDAY to do the work. I was not happy with construction being done on the Sabbath. The construction company, from what I could tell, was run by these two ladies. They had shown me a picture of what they were going to do, but from what I remember, it looked like they were going to follow the same basic pattern as the pre-existing fireplace, but just replace the rock with shiplap....

I was sorely mistaken....

Saturday morning, the guy and what I think was his son, showed up to begin the work.  The minute they peeled back the plastic so they could enter the room, a wave of stench punched you in the face.  It was so bad that the poor kid started to dry heave and had to leave the house.  Once he recovered from the shock of the smell they framed the whole thing in.  That's all just one big, massive, waste of stinky space they just created....

The only thing the accomplished was trapping the stink in that massive eyesore.  I do have to admit that the smell was diminished by all of this.  We kind of felt like we were back to where we started, with being gaslit by the house. The smell was still there, but it would randomly sneak up on you.  Sometimes I would smell it but Nathan wouldn't and visa versa.  Oh, and you could still smell it outside when the wind blows in the right direction.  Just another reason why I still think there is another source.  And yes, that is the sheetrock they use in showers.  Why they used it here, I haven't got a clue.  

Then we waited, and heard nothing about when they were coming back to finish everything. A couple of days later, they randomly showed up stating that they were here to paint. No one was really communicating anything to us. For instance, I was not made aware that they would be painting the ENTIRE ROOM. I thought they would be matching the color and only painting the half of the room where the construction had been. We had furniture and stuff all shoved up against the other end of the room so it would be out of the way of the construction. Me, Jacen, and Eilee had to scramble to get everything moved out of the way. Nathan was stuck at work in a meeting and couldn't make it over to help (see, Nathan works from home, but because we couldn't use the sunroom for most of the time, he had to find somewhere to go work. There is a work space at the Technical school that he is now renting a space in).

When we moved into this house, there were some very, um, shall we say 70's curtains hanging from this window.  With all of the construction, they had been taken down, with zero plans of putting them back up again.  However, the sheetrock guy was supposed to patch up the holes.  He did not.  The ladies then had to run to the store to pick up some mud to fix the holes, which meant that they couldn't paint. They painted everything else and said they would be back the next day to finish the job.  They did not come back the next day.

A couple of days later, the guy who had done the insulation randomly showed up and said that he was there to do the painting.  He painted the spots above the window and then, THEN he put MASKING TAPE around the edges of this ugly box, and then painted it an almost imperceptibly lighter shade of depression gray.  And also, it's not like there wasn't any PAINTERS TAPE available for him, as there were several rolls of it laying around!!

Guess what happens when you put up MASKING TAPE over fresh paint???

If you guessed that it would tear off the paint and part of the sheetrock paper, you would be correct.

This is the ceiling.  The guy wasn't here for very long.  My question is why??  Why did he paint the box when they are just going to cover it with shiplap?!?!?!?

And now we get to Halloween. They came on Halloween to put up the shiplap and get it ready for the fireplace to be installed, and I haven't even begun to tell you about the fireplace. Don't worry though, we will get to that, after all, it is the proverbial straw that broke the camels back.

No accent colors, just gray.  Gray walls, gray shiplap, everything is gray.  Sure the gray shiplap is a slightly lighter color of gray than the walls, but it's all just gray.  And don't get me started on the whole ugly eyesore that is now dominating the room.  It looks like the back of someone's house was swept up in a Tornado and then crashed right into my Living Room.  The minute they took out the sheetrock for the fireplace, the whole house was hit with a wave of stench.  They put up this black garbage bag in the hopes of holding back the smell.  I'll give you a hint, it didn't work.

And now we get to the fireplace....

Lets' recap shall we!?!?  The original fireplace was a GAS fireplace.  Somehow, someone made a mistake and ordered an ELECTRIC fireplace, which put the construction on hold.  I assumed that they were exchanging the electric fireplace with a gas fireplace since the construction was put on hold because of it.  I was wrong.  When the guy showed up to do the sheetrock, he also showed up with the electric fireplace.  On Halloween, when the lady was were here putting up the shiplap and painting it, Nathan, being the engineer he is, got to looking at box that the fireplace was in, and noticed something.  The thing he noticed?  This fireplace has a vent.  Well, that leads to questions.  Questions like where does it vent the air from, and then, where does it vent the air to?  The lady putting up the shiplap didn't have a clue.  So, Nathan called the manufacturer and asked them.  This fireplace takes the air behind it and vents it across the heating elements and then blows the hot air out the front.  Does anyone see the problem with this??  That box is all empty space where all of that stinky air is just hanging out.  That electric fireplace unit, which takes the air BEHIND it, and HEATS it up, and then BLOWS it out the front is basically going to take that stinky air, heat it up, and blow it right into the house.  Nothing possibly could go wrong with that!!!  Immediately after getting off the phone with the manufacturer, he told the lady what he had learned.  She immediately called the other lady and told her about the problem.  We thought that surely they wouldn't install the fireplace...........

They did. A couple of days later, the guy who messed up the paint by putting up MASKING TAPE came over, once again unannounced and stated that he was here to install the fireplace. When the guy was done, he showed me how the thing worked. He turned it on, and it started blowing out hot stinky air into the room. He assured me that the smell would eventually go away, then he left. I immediately called Nathan to tell him what had just happened. That was it, we were officially done. Previous to this, we were going to at least stick it out until the end of February, and MAYBE until the end of the school year. The house and the bats had finally defeated us, and we threw in the towel. Simply put, that smell isn't going to go away. There is still another source. Until you get rid of that source, it will continue to stink. And, by the way, you don't even have turn on the fireplace to get the stinky air, it just comes out of the vent at the top of the thing. We had to put painters tape over it. We ramped up our looking for houses, and miraculously found a nice house here in Kaysville, close enough that Meow-meow will not have to transfer schools. Sadly, it does mean we will move to a new ward, and stake. But hey, moving shouldn't be that hard because we were never able to unpack at least 80% of this house!!

Then.....THEN.... (I bet you are wondering what in the world could happen next)

Saturday, November 8th, just minutes before the start of the BYU game that shall not be talked about, there was a knock on the door.  It was a husband and wife couple and they said they were there to install the mantle.  I was certainly not made aware of this visit.  I told them to do whatever, but if they needed me, I would be unavailable because, football...... and thou shalt not interrupt during a football game!!  Nathan was off running errands, so he wasn't home to run interference.  I went into my room and shut the door and ignored them (they were warned).  And don't get me started on this joke of a mantle....

First of all, it is made out of plastic that has a "wood grain" pattern stamped on it. Secondly, it's ugly and doesn't match. Thirdly, it is flimsy!!  If you sneeze wrong it will fall down.  I attempted to put something on it, and it completely fell off onto the floor.  

We've had a couple of people stop by in the past couple of weeks, and they all have said that they can smell the stink. One of our neighbors brought over an epic homemade Hepa filter that he made. When it is turned on to it's highest setting, it does a fairly decent job of cutting down the smell, the problem is that it is also kind of loud. It's not deafeningly loud, but loud enough that having a conversation is a challenge. This morning, when I woke up, I noticed a bit of a smell to the house, then I noticed that the fan was off (thank you very much Cocoa Bean). The cat had stepped on the remote and turned it off at some point during the night.

Fun fact: With this weirdly and unseasonably warm weather (which I am totally NOT complaining about) it means that, in the afternoon, when the backside of the house gets heated up, the stank in the house increases. You know it's bad when you are driving down the road and get the smell of a freshly killed skunk, and think that it's not too bad of a smell. You know those would you rather games, like, "would you rather have a tarantula or 1,000 ants in your bed?" Well, if someone asked me, "would you rather smell a skunk or bat guano?" I would answer, and without hesitation, that I would rather smell a skunk!!

This has been a SIX month nightmare, that I will probably have trauma from for a very long time. We are done, emotionally, mentally, and physically. This house has broken us. There will come a day when we will look back on it and laugh, but it won't be for a very long time. I never thought I would see the day when I would be looking forward to a move, but here we are. We fell in love with the ward, and it is heart wrenching to have to leave. But, there are new adventures to be made and new ward members to get to know in our new place. The nice thing is that Meow-meow will still be able to see the friends he's made in this ward at school. And the new house is bat FREE!!

We gave notice to the rental company that we would be breaking the contract early, citing Utah code that gives renters leave to break the contract if the living conditions of the house are not livable. Thankfully the rental company did not put up an argument and let us out of the contract without penalty. We move on December 1st, and let me tell you, these next two weeks are going to be insane. We've been working like crazy to get everything packed because, ONE week from TODAY, Jimmy comes home from his mission!!!!! We will have Thanksgiving at my parents house on the 26th, Thanksgiving at Nathan's parents on the 27th, start the move on the 28th, then keep moving on the 29th, then, the evening of the 29th is the last home football game of the season, the 30th Eilee gives her farewell talk and Jimmy gives his homecoming talk, and the 1st is when we have to have everything out of here and have it all cleaned and ready to turn over the keys.

There you have it, the full, complete and detailed events of the saga of the bat house. Congratulations if you made it to this point.