"I'm gonna catch it in the coat... And smack it with the hammer"

When we left you last time we were about to venture deep into the ceiling and walls of our bathroom to try to discover the source of the burning/smoldering smell.  Andy used his amazing sense of smell to locate the source to a particular area of the ceiling and that's where he began to cut.  It didn't take long to figure out what Andy was smelling.  As soon as he cut a hole he discovered an old, decaying squirrel!  Poor Andy, not only did he discover the squirrel but it was completely up to him to discard the squirrel as well, I was NOT going to be involved at all.

How or why a decaying squirrel produced an odor that was similar to a burning smell is a mystery, but the smell seems to be gone now that our (not so) furry friend is gone.

Finding a dead squirrel in your ceiling is certainly distressing, but you know what's worse?

Finding one staring at you when you come out of the bathroom!

Friday night around 3:30 in the morning Andy went up to our third floor bathroom (since our second floor bathroom still has a hole in the ceiling) and when he came out he saw an adolescent squirrel staring back at him!  He yelled down the stairs to wake me up and groggy and blurry eyed I went upstairs to see what was causing the commotion.  Andy tells me there's a squirrel in the house.  I don't think I comprehended what he was saying until I actually saw it running underneath our baseboard heating.

We thought how are we EVER going to catch a squirrel?  We didn't have a large dog to chase it around our house, or a Santa coat and hammer to catch it with, but some how Andy did manage to corner it and lure it into a box.  We released it out in our driveway after which I'm sure he ran right back into our eaves!

The most troubling part of this experience is knowing that if there was one adolescent in our house, there must be more!!  We went out got a Havahart trap, baited it with sunflower seeds and now we're just waiting...

Oh the joys of home ownership!