Construction Pictures

First up, the pre-shot. This shows the plywood patches we threw over the hole, and the vent to the crawlspace that the possum used to get underneath the house.

Close-up of the vent. As you can see, hubby-Eric covered it REALLY well so we wouldn't get more critters in the crawlspace.

They pulled the plywood off, then took off a little bit of the siding, and this is what they found. You can't see most of the ants, but the whole wall is one REALLY big antfarm.

When they pulled one section off, the ants just spilled out. The ants themselves don't show in the images so well, but you can see the eggs.

This is what it looked like after they'd cleaned up the ants and got a hole through the wall into the bedroom.

Here's a shot of the interior from our living room looking out. The damage in the corner is what I first noticed when I discovered the problem. We also suspect that the mouse came up through that hole.

Another interior shot, this one from the bedroom, just on the other side of the spill of ants.

Back to the living room, they've now taken out a section of the wall that was ant-infested, and we made the decision (jointly, they asked me) to cut the floor so they could find all the ants and get rid of the lot of them.

This contractor does not do hardwood floors, so I'll have to bring in a specialist sometime later to replace the bit that they fix. In the meantime, it'll have a plywood patch, but the ants will all be gone.

The other option was to leave the floor alone and hope that the hardwood guys I hire could find the rest of the ants and fix the subfloor and joists. It wasn't really much of a choice. I'd rather have an ugly plywood patch for awhile than ants.

And there goes my beautiful floor... This corner was actually the first part of the hardwood floor in this house that I saw. When my mother-in-law and I were looking at it just before we bought it, she pulled up the carpet in that corner, and that was when I decided we had to refinish the floors and dump the carpet.

The opossum hole from the inside! That's a view of the house I hope to never have again.

Inside the bedroom looking out again. You can't see them very well, but the floor is crawling with ants in this image.

And one last look at the wall now that it's been ripped up. Hopefully this is the last of the "before" pictures, and I'll have a lot of "after" pictures of nicely restored siding and a plywood patch on the floor to show.

And we haven't even looked at the gutters yet. Still, I have hope that this will be done fairly quickly and professionally. These guys really seem to know what they are doing. I grew up around construction (my dad started to build an addition on his house when I was very young), and I'm impressed by them so far.