My normal view on home repair is to hide in my bed and claim my knee is bothering me (you’d be surprised how many times that works). Unfortunately, some times you cannot ignore some problems, because you know they are going to turn into much bigger issues if you don’t deal with them (an example would be pride goeth before a plumber, where I was so sure I had fixed my plumbing, but not quite).
A problem such as this has arisen at the Cajun Homestead with skittering and scuttering noises in one of our walls. Â We noticed that thanks to our awning cover being just under the eaves of our house, some larger creature used that leverage point and pushed up the soffit in the eaves and the following hole was created under there.
From what we can tell this hole was then pushed further open to allow all manner of critters into an attic on the side of our house (our house has divided roof decks, and naturally I can’t get into this attic area, to make a repair).
The noise of critters in this attic finally got to Mrs. C8j and she announced to me that she didn’t care how lazy (or injured) I was we had to do something about this before the winter comes and these beasts move in permanently (and then their babies arriving in the spring could create many more problems). I hesitantly agreed and off we went to Home Depot to kibitz about how to fix this hole.
We finally decided on a temporary fix that will cover the hole with a strong metal mesh  (stronger that chicken wire), held in place with metal tapping screws. You can see the fix over the hole in the picture supplied.  This seems to have stopped the critters from entering for now, and hopefully for the foreseeable future as well.
We will eventually have to deal with this and replace the eaves and possibly clear out whatever mess exists in the attic area (figuring out how to get in there is going to be interesting enough), but for now I think our house is a bit better secured (against squirrels at least).
I realize this temporary fix will have to be remedied for real if we ever want to sell the house, but sometimes a temporary measure is needed to get you through a short period. Â This kind of short period fix may also be needed with your financial plans, given how screwed up the global economies appear to be, but remember you will eventually have to put in place a real long-term fix (didn’t think I could swing this over to personal finance, did you?).
Why am I writing about this? Pride? No, but it’s important not to procrastinate too much, or you might end up with much bigger problems faster than you think.
