Murphy's Law: Raccoon Style

We used to think that raccoons walking along ours and our neighbor's back fence were cute and try to take photos and video of them until last month.

We were surprised and pleased to find that starlings weren't nesting in our attic this spring.

A few weeks ago, our neighbors knocked on the door and told us that we had a raccoon walking on our roof. My husband chased it away.

We started hearing noises in the attic and I assumed that the birds had returned.

I noticed a wood shingle in our gutter on the chimney side of the house. My husband and son went up into the attic and found Mrs. Raccoon and three kits living up there. Our neighbor, who happens to work as a roofer, climbed up onto the roof and found that Mrs. Raccoon had ripped into our roof where the backside of the chimney meets the roof line.

We realized that starling eggs, and maybe birds, make tasty treats for the raccoons. Score one for the raccoons.

We called Darrin, a.k.a. the professional "raccoon man". Darrin came and set up traps.

One night, Mrs. Raccoon, or her kits, decided to start clawing its way into our living room through the ceiling. This got a little too personal for my husband and so he went up to take care of the raccoons. He succeeded in chasing them out of the attic.

The raccoon man came, looked in the attic and found that Mrs. Raccoon and her kits were no longer there. He gave instructions to have the roof repaired. The roof was repaired by our kind neighbor.

We contacted Mike, a homeschooling father, who happens to be a contractor/handyman and asked him if he could clean up the mess in our attic and properly repair the hole in our ceiling (my husband's temporary patch job was browning). He waited a week or two before coming to do the repairs in order to make sure Mrs. Raccoon was not going to return.

On Monday of this week, Mike came to our house and spent a large portion of his day cleaning up our attic and repairing our ceiling.

Yesterday, Thursday, as I was doing my daily gardening, I noticed a wood shingle on the ground and a roof shingle in the gutter. Brendan asked our neighbor, Rick, if he could take a look at our roof. He did so and found that Mrs. Raccoon had ripped into it again. I called my husband and said, "You're not going to believe this." Then, I called Darrin, the raccoon man, and left a message.

Last night, my husband heard Mrs. Raccoon making her noises above our kitchen.

Hopefully, the raccoon man succeeds in ridding our attic of this menace soon.

I can't believe that Mrs. Raccoon returned two days after the attic was cleaned up. I can't believe we used to think that raccoons walking along our back fence were cute.