AsaHunt1830Farmhouse

Back in 2000, not long after we had moved into the Hunt House, we were eating breakfast and heard a plaintive mewing coming from somewhere. At first it seemed to come from living room, but when we investigated we thought we could hear it coming from under the floorboards. Aha: the basement!

We went down there and, after moving aside some boxes and furniture, we found, pressed against a wall, a tiny frightened kitten, barely able to walk. We couldn’t figure out how it got down there, but we took it to the vet, raised it until it was old enough to be adopted, and found it a home. (This was the first of over a dozen feral cats that came through our kitty orphanage over the years.) But we were left wondering: how did it get down there?

Some years later, we noticed a nasty smell emanating from the basement. We investigated, to no avail. The smell got worse. And then really awful. We started pulling out insulation in the crawl space, and we found…something. We don’t know what it was, but it was larger than a football, very decomposed, and reeked of death. We quickly bagged it and trashed it, wondering: how did THAT get down there?

Part of the answer came when yet another creature, this time a large groundhog, appeared downstairs. He was digging in our crawlspace and chewing on our PVC plumbing. We managed to lure him back outside and I found some whistle-pig excavations along the foundation which I closed back up. But still, we couldn’t figure it out. How did he get in?

In the end, it was the fire that revealed the answer. With the Hunt House nearly destroyed, we had to pull out all the interior, right down to the studs. Including all plumbing and electrical wires. And the very last thing that was removed was the set of electrical panels in the southeast corner of the basement.

And right behind it: a set of open holes around the wires and major conduit, just large enough for a small kitten to squeeze into, and fall behind the panels and onto the basement floor.

And just above that, a larger, more ambitious project. At the top of the old stone foundation – broken from years of folks clumsily installing electrical wires, phone lines, and FIOS cables – there is a large oak beam some 10 feet long. And right down the middle of it, from one end to the other, some enterprising rodent had chewed a large tunnel. Behold! Rodent Route 1. (See the Gallery below.)

We got a five-gallon bucket of mortar, and some stones from the yard, and plugged that thing up. And then, just for good measure, we inspected the rest of the now-empty basement and found nothing more.

But just the same, when the insulation contractor shows up to spray the foundation, we’ll ask him to take another look…

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