That’s right, I’m rebelling and I’m not going back into the attic until all my demands are met!! . . . or until I have to fool with taking those damn abandoned HVAC pipes out, anyhow.
This evening I climbed back up the ladder, hauling a roll of screening, and cut and installed a new gable vent screen in the south vent. The old screening was galvanized steel (as is the new) and horribly rotten—I could simply yank on it and great chunks would dissolve in a cloud of rust. Behind the screen was a great mess of bird dung and dirt-dauber wasp nests that had to be chipped and scraped out, creating yet more clouds of nastiness.
Once everything was clear (and after I’d climbed down to wash my hands and soak several places the rotten screen wire punched my fingers in hydrogen peroxide) I stapled up the new screening and cut it back to the edge of the vent, then cross-stapled the screen across the gable slats to discourage future invasions by birds and rats. The north vent needs cleaning and the screen replaced too, but it can wait for a future event, since it doesn’t have a rat-sized hole in it, which the south one did. Until then, I’ve gotten the extension ladder down (getting ten feet of extension ladder out of a three-by-five closet is a production in itself) and outdoors so I can use it to put up gutters, and the crawl hole in the closet’s closed so I don’t have to smell all the dust and dirt and filth every time I open the closet door.
