Rats

No, like seriously, we have rats in our garage. It's more like an infestation, actually. This is going to be an extremely unsexy post....

Ok. so like the entire family has been trying to pretend we didn't really have a problem because we really use and love our garage. La la la la la la, boy it smells bad down here, must be the rain.  La la la la la, oh my god, what the hell is that by that Ibeam? 

Yes, folks, that's what a rat's nest looks like in a wall. Trust me, this was not a DIY project.  I called my contractor who sent over three brave guys.

They just started to follow the trail...

which meant cutting away the drywall and removing the insulation. This was some sort of thoroughfare. 

Even this scene from Ratatouille completely grossed me out.

You can imagine how I felt about this.

The rats had access to all this insulation in the crawlspace so the guys removed it all.

My contractor thought the rats were burrowing up through the concrete skim coat in the crawl space, so they patched where the dirt was exposed. He thinks this is the case because my house is new and the regulations for building are really strict (all walls must be rated one hour for fire which the city's building inspectors strictly enforce). This means there can be no gaps in property line construction walls, hence no sneaky rats.

Thankfully the guys removed everything and cleaned really well but now I need to have an exterminator come in and make sure they are all gone, for real. In the meantime our garage is looking like this until we can make use of the crawlspace for storage again.