Wayne D's Blog

For the fourth time since I have become a homeowner I have a raccoon, This is the first time in this house but in my previous house I had raccoons in the attic twice and in the chimney once.

I was going out to the car last night and heard the sound of rending metal, by the time I found a flashlight the raccoon had ripped through a corner of the soffit and was staring down at me from it's perch in my eaves, eyes shining in the darkness. I ran the garage door up and down a few times, this only made it move deeper into the garage. Previous experience has shown that the appropriate application of mothballs will cause the raccoon to vacate the premises. An important side note, if you don't want your house to smell like mothballs for months they should be secured in a nylon stocking or other suitable bag so they can be removed after the raccoon leaves.The hard part this time was finding mothballs. The neighbourhood hardware store on my side of town closed down years ago. I stopped at a supermarket and a Rona home centre on the way home and neither of them had mothballs. The guy at the Rona store tried to sell me a raccoon trap but I don't really want a box of angry raccoon, I'd prefer it leaves under it's own power. I finally found some mothballs in one of my local dollar stores. Instead of the big cardboard box they came in a plastic envelope. They look like the round peppermints and their weren't very many in the package so I bought three packs. I climbed up the ladder and looked for the raccoon and unlike last night I couldn't see it anywhere. I tied the mothballs in a stocking and put them in the back corner of the garage up in the rafters where I thought I heard some noise. I'll give them two days to work their magic and ensure that the raccoon is gone and then I'll patch the hole it made. Updates to follow.