Last night while waiting for my garage door to open I see two eyes looking out at me from my attic vent! Too small to be a person and why would anyone be in my attic but starring down at me. I knew right there and then I needed a professional Houston critter removal.
Who do I call? I have never needed a Houston critter removal. Do I call the police? Should I get my neighbor who hunts come and take care of this critter? So I call animal control? Does my pest control service handle critters? All of this was racing through my mine lightning fast.
Calm down, think. I don’t think the police will come in my attic. My neighbor will shoot holes in my house so I’m not going to call him. Ah ha! I will call animal control. Nope, animal control will loan me a trap to do it myself. I don’t have the guts to go up in my attic. I don’t want to be crazy attacked by a monster critter.
I know, for sure my pest control company will trap and get rid of this critter. Yeah, they said they can put poison in attic and to play loud music to scare the critter away. No way! Who do I call??!!
You know what you do when you don’t know what to do, you go online and figure it out. I’m so glad I did, I found out there is a entire industry devoted to getting rid of critters. I searched for Houston critter removal and found pages of companies in Houston that do critter removal for a fee.
So my search for a Houston critter removal began. I soon found out that not all Houston critter removal services are alike. When calling to get someone out I found that some companies come for free and some come for what they called a paid inspection. Do the free ones charge more because it free or does the paid inspections cost less because you have already paid something?
Not knowing which kind of initial visit I wanted to go for I decided to call back the companies and ask the price ranges for having an animal in the attic. Funny, got the same humbo jumbo vague answer from most of them…”We haven’t seen your attic for how many critters are in there, we don’t know the damages for repair, and we need to see how extensive the clean up will be. I get it but you would think there would be some kind of average cost to this critter problem.
Then I found this one company that was very nice on the phones. Answered professionally. sympathetic to my problem. Could come out immediately. When asked if there was an initial inspection cost they said no that they would inspect for free. I asked what would be the round about cost involved?
She did say that same ole blah blah blah about they needed to see it but, she then started to actually talk about the whole process of a Houston critter removal. She asked my why I was calling so I told her about the eyes looking out at me from the attic vent. She said typically trapping for two traps runs about $300. Minor clean up starts at $100 but could very well go into the thousands if the critter has been in the attic for a long time.
It was explained to be entry points were going to be repaired and if it was just one entry it most likely would not go over $200 to repair but again said this is not a quote because she had no idea what the cost was to my home since she had not seen my house.
She did say sanitizing would be $250 for each attic which I only have one. She was very nice and was trying to inform be but not scare me away and she did a good job. The last thing she said was they had removed a critter from an attic for $150, repaired the entry for $100, and there was no clean up for other clients. However they had gone into many situations that were thousands of dollars when the homeowner never heard the critters in their attics.
I still was reluctant to schedule only because the pricing was unknown. She had explained it to me so I did understand why she could not give a firm price, so I scheduled.
This Houston critter removal service arrived on time. Performed an exterior inspection of my home for entries. Found three possible entries and one entry that was absolutely the doorway into my attic.
They then went up into my attic and found a mother raccoon had just giving birth about a week ago in just left of my attic vent. I had no idea!
The wildlife control technician told me there was a method of removal that didn’t require any trapping or live catching the raccoon. He said that a scent control product would be placed by the mother raccoon and randomly around the attic. It scares the mother raccoon into relocating the litter of pups by having male raccoon pheromones in the product. Male raccoon will often find a female after she has had a litter and kill the pups to impregnate the female again. Female raccoon will fight and often loose this battle so this method works good naturally and is less expensive.
It was explained to me that scent control is less expensive because there is less return visits and no relocating wildlife fees. They said this method is about 80% successful, If it does not work then they would have to trap and relocate.
I said to go ahead with the scent control method because the mother raccoon should leave that evening. A follow up visit was scheduled for 2 days.
Two days arrived and I was excited to see what the Houston critter removal services would find in my attic. After a complete re-inspection of my property and attic there was no raccoon! The repairs and minor clean up was completed and I wrote a check to Masters Services for about $700. More than I wanted to pay but the holes in my house were repaired professionally, the attic was sanitized, and no more critters were starring at me from my attic when I get home.
