Rat hole and gnawed wood.

Except for a couple weeks last year when they terrorized us, mice have not been that big a deal. Keep crumbs off the floor, make sure to clean the dishes every day, and keep the trash shut tight. No problem, just the occasional mouse here and there. I figured, as long as we’re relatively clean, we’ll never have to worry about rats.

Well, I was wrong. You have to be immaculate. And even then, they still like your warm house in the winter.

Above the front basement windows there was a small gap that I figured rats and mice could get in. I later found evidence — debris from inside had been kicked outside. A couple weeks ago I decided to cram chunks of concrete in the gaps — they fit snugly. No rat was getting in here, I said to myself with self-satisfaction. At that moment as I was crouching there, I felt something hit me in the ass. Then a rat darted between my legs and frantically bounced up and down in front of the former hole. Realizing the hole was gone, it darted in another direction. My neighbor’s dog tried to catch it but it just escaped his claws and ran toward the back yard.

Yesterday as I came home from Fortunata’s, I saw a pile of splinters and a big chunk of wood at the same spot. A fucking rat had gnawed away the wood AROUND the concrete and reopened a new hole. I’m going to have to screw in wire mesh and mash concrete over it.

Then this morning one of my tenants said he caught a rat going through his trash at 6am. Last week it shit on his bed. Not cool.

A friend in Florida recommended “place packs.” I’ve been nervous about using poison because of neighborhood dogs, but he said the rats just take them away and eat them where they hide. They croak and then it just stinks for a week. Awful.

The new presence of rats on my block could be due to all the debris-filled lots being cleared off for new construction in the last few months. Other than that, not knowing much about rodent habitats, I have no other guesses.

Anyone have any helpful info… or rat horror stories?

I’ll be brief: In between actual work, I’m busy itemizing every last box of garbage can liners, every paint brush, every power tool, anything and everything we spent this year in any capacity on the house. My accountant says that because part of the house is a rental unit, we can deduct anything we used on the rental part and common areas. Since our own apartment is borderline squalor, almost all of it was used to bring the “paying customer” areas up to the standards of Western Civilization.

But why bother, when the paying customers are 30-year-olds who live like a typical 19-year-old and keep their rooms like a typical 12-year-old? No exaggeration, one girl who just left kept her room in a perpetual state of disaster. You could not avoid stepping on something in her room. She bought a bed and slept on it with no sheets or blankets. She tacked a piece of sheer fabric over half the windows and then complained it was too bright at night. I harangued her to clean up her room any time I had the misfortune of noticing it was still full of all the same shit as the last time I bugged her. Adding insult to injury, she smelled bad. And then she had her friend stay at the house for five days — which would have been fine if she didn’t have the friend stay in a separate room I normally rented out and use my electric heater cranked up to the high setting. I would have at least liek to have been asked, and I would have said yes. When I confronted her, she was baffled that I might be even mildly annoyed. When she finally moved out — after a month of postponing her move-out date — she tossed the splintered remains of her furniture onto the curb as if the garbage men went about their work happily picking up every scrap of refuse us residents were too lazy to bundle up. No, I had to bundle the pieces of wood up myself on trash day and stack them neatly. Oh yeah, nobody wants your hideous fatpants, honey, so don’t hang them from your broken-ass dresser on the curb like anyone in this neighborhood is poor enough or tasteless enough to deign to add such a hideous item to their wardrobe. Please.

Anyway, the girl who took over the whole apartment and then got her own roommates — yeah her CHECK BOUNCED. Well, since we both have the same bank, when I went to deposit it, they kindly told me they could not accept it, and they couldn’t tell me why. I got a lame excuse as to why her account was NSF, and since I’m a fucking pushover I’m not charging her late fees. I tell myself it’s because I want her transition into taking over the apartment to go smoothly, as it’s in my interest. Whatever it takes, you know? To not feel like a stupid fucking fag with no business sense. Anyway, other than that she’s a pretty good tenant, and her check did go through today.

What is so hard about putting the garbage can lids on tightly? Do they like rats? Or do they like seeing me have to rebag the trash after the rats shred it to bits and piss and shit all over it? Hilarious. For all of you, surely. Ah, Bushwick.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming. Otherwise, Monday. I know, I’m so presumptuous. You’ll live.

This is pretty much the most beautiful day I can remember since moving to Bushwick. Not a cloud in the sky, a brisk breeze wafting through my open windows…sure, I have to keep the door to the back yard closed so rats don’t come in and workers are busy building a five-story condo 20 feet from my back property line that will look directly into my garden, but you take the good with the bad, right? And everything has a silver lining. Most things. I guess people looking down into my yard gives me the kick in the pants I need to finish cleaning and landscaping it.

I hope they’re planning on clearing off the rubble-filled lot next door to the condo. Be useful if they actually plan on selling them.

A girl just came to look at a room I have available and agreed that it’s a beautiful day but expressed a little worry that it’s 62 in January. I said, if this is global warming, bring it on. She didn’t mind that Bushwick doesn’t have much in the way of entertainment, just that even after having walked around the hood all day, she’s still a bit nervous about getting killed or whatever. Fine. She’s a native New Yorker, and so had all kinds of preconceptions that likely colored her day here.

On the weather front, it’s all downhill tomorrow. Back to sweaters and jackets and uncomfortably cold fingers, despite the cashmere lining in my gloves. Okay that’s enough, back to work.

Niko warms up in front of the makeshift heater.

My whole heating system is messed up: the boiler leaks and the house is freezing in the back and hot in the front. Last year when the thermostat broke for a few days and we had no heat at all, I turned the oven on and worked at the kitchen table to try and stay warm. I remembered that the other day as I was washing dishes and shivering — it must have been 55 in the kitchen. So I cranked the oven on and opened the door, then went into the warm office to do some work. 20 minutes later I came back and the kitchen was warmer than the office! I looked at the thermostat, set at 68 — it read 71.

I have a whole house-wide central heating system and the thing that heats my apartment up the quickest is my oven. Lame.

Anyone else have ghetto rig stories and photos they want to share from their Bushwick apartment? Email me from the contact link on the left.

My friend helps me shovel snow in front of the house yesterday. In Prada boots and Juicy Couture sweatpants.

When we moved in here, there were no mice or bugs of any kind, which was strange because it’s a very old house and the previous inhabitants were… not so clean. We saw plenty of evidence of previous infestations — closets full of mouse turds, dead German cockroaches all over the place, gnawed wood — but no live specimens. This lasted for months until a nearby lot was being cleared of the debris of a house that had burned down. Apparently the mice that lived in that mess took off for greener pastures — our yard and house. They terrorized us for two weeks, crapping on the kitchen counters and in the silverware drawers, darting between our legs, and then abruptly disappeared. There was an occasional mouse here and there for the next few months, and now they’re starting to nest downstairs, to the chagrin of one of my housemates.

We tried humane traps. The mice laugh. We tried snap traps. The mice roll their eyes. I finally allowed the above housemate to bring home glue traps, which he laid out like a force field across the path where the mice enter. They just don’t cross the line. We hypothesized that the mice know the smell of the glue. Whatever the reason, nobody in this entire house has ever caught a mouse in any kind of trap. And our dog, bred to hunt mice in German castles, is useless. I have been hearing similar stories from other people in the hood, and it seems that Bushwick mice have street smarts: they know what will kill them and they avoid it.

For now, I’m stuffing holes with steel wool and being maniacal about keeping the trash sealed up. I’m even scattering cotton balls with peppermint oil on them along their living room-kitchen run path. I haven’t seen any in a couple of weeks, so it could be working. When we dip into freezing temperatures, I think the battle will only become more difficult.

Anyone else have rodent horror or success stories to share?

My yard is no stranger to trash. It’s a good 2 feet higher than the neighbors’ because of the three decades of household trash tossed into the soil as a sort of emulsifier. But we have cleaned the top layer and laid a patio and garden in a small corner of it, and I’m annoyed when I have to pick up new trash.

But one day a couple weeks ago I couldn’t help but be amused by the out-of-the-ordinary refuse I found as I let the dog out — one pair of pink panties, one open package of lube, and one big, fat, gushy condom full of milky sperm. I usually pick up the trash around my house barehanded, but I wasn’t touching that shit. So I went inside to get a paper towel, and when I came out, my housemates had let their dogs out — and the condom had mysteriously disappeared. I assume it was the big ridgeback-mix puppy who, uh, cleaned it up for me. Gross.

Every few days, another pair of panties sails into my yard from the building a couple doors down. That’s right, they have to make an effort to fling them over my neighbor’s yard and into mine. Like when they tossed that glue trap with a smashed mouse in it a few months back. It takes talent.

Those apartments are mostly Section 8 and stabilized. I guess now we know where the money they’re saving on rent is going — into an endless supply of new panties.

Whatever, joke’s on them — that dump will be condos in a year (like I figured months ago). Done deal.

This weekend we couldn’t resist any longer: we took out the stupid wall that formed a ridiculously wide hallway between the front and back of the apartment, and boxed the living room in darkness and stagnant air. There are so many other projects we haven’t yet completed, like finally finishing the new paint job in the entrance hall — but with that wall gone, we can literally breathe easier while we watch tivoed Simpsons episodes.

This is the dangerous part for the amateur renovator. All those sexy, exposed ceiling slats and that slutty hint of bare plank floor seem to draw my crowbar toward them like a powerful magnet. It’s a single, practical, easy demolition — but that’s the gateway drug to an all-out superfluous wall steamrolling from one end to the other. How I ache to expose those naughty raw planks under the decades of crappy linoleum and cheap parquet! How I long to jam my reciprocating saw heavenward to tear out all the ceilings and flaunt the fresh nakedness of the structural beams above! I shudder with delight to think that all that would separate me from the blue sky itself is a few 130-year-old planks of wood and a sheathing of rubber.

Of course all those boring questions of practicality nag: Will my heating and cooling expenses rise significantly? If I screw up, can I afford to have a professional fix it? But the danger, too, excites.

Maybe if we just hurry up and drywall over those suggestive holes we’ll forget about the urge to go bad…or have we opened Pandora’s box? Have we bitten the ripe forbidden fruit that will now never let us forget the possibility of 14-foot ceilings?

God help us! — we have plenty of extra paint brushes.

Every time I walk by an empty lot with tons of bluestone, I make a mental note. It’s heavy stuff, and a lot of it needs to be dug out, so if I don’t have a definite project for it I’m not going to beg a ride in my friend’s truck to go harvest it. But this weekend I needed bricks, so I went around the corner with my orange bucket and fished about 50 bricks out to finish a small area for my grill. While I was deep in the ruins, I discovered some decrepit old blue hatch doors, and even though I have no idea what to do with them, I grabbed them anyhow.

I have them propped up to screen the part of the yard that’s still trash and weeds from the more finished section, but I think it looks half-ass. Any suggestions for these things?

I have been complaining endlessly about the lot directly next door, which over the last six months has been piled with junk cars and 10-foot-high mounds of trash and debris. Mice started to show up in our house, then the neighbor’s house. Then one day last week, a crew smashed down the fence and yanked all the cars out. The boss was complaining to one of the workers: “I haven’t seen anything this bad in 20 years.” I stuck my head out the window and asked, “Are you cleaning this whole lot out?” He said yes, and I thanked him very much. The next day, a dumpster came and a crew filled it with most of the junk in the lot. They’re not done but they made a lot of progress.

Suddenly, my housemates started sitting in the back yard. “It’s so much nicer out here without all that junk looming over you.” It really was like a dictatorship had fallen — a dictatorship of the disrespectful and the slovenly. And the mice have, surprisingly quickly, vanished. The next step will be to shove their 15-foot fence, which is encroaching on and tipping over onto my yard, over to their side.

The lesson here is, complaining does work, even in Bushwick. So use it responsibly.

Anyone have a similar story of cleaned up (or not!) junk lots?

more »