October 12, 2008
- Roseburg, Oregon
"Holy Infested Attic, Batman!"
By Megan Sweeney
ROSEBURG, Ore. -- Wednesday we told you about a man who bought a house in Roseburg that ended up having hundreds of bats inside the attic. Thursday, KPIC Reporter Megan Sweeney went inside the attic of the bat infested home.
Home buyers beware, if you are buying a house, there's crucial information you need to know before you open up your wallets. Zebulun Gallagher learned his lesson the hard way. Zebulun bought his house on Mill Street for his mother, but it turned out to be infested with hundreds of bats. "I never owned a house before, thought it was going to be a pretty amazing experience. I'm pretty exhausted from it, and the whole third story being taken up by bats doesn't help." The bats are inside the attic, and there was an inspection done on the house before they bought it. But the bats were not discovered. They had no idea the bats were in there. "I went up stairs to the sound of a thousand squeakings and the horrible smell of vinegar and ammonia from the bat droppings." There's piles of bat droppings all over the floor of the attic. The stench is so bad that you have to wear a mask to be able to breaths. Some of the bats you can see hanging from the boards in the roof, the owners are estimating that there are hundreds more. It turns out there was a pest and dry-rot inspection done by an inspector from Good News Home Inspections. That kind of inspection only looks under the house and does a walk-through. The inspector, John Labelle says he can note items of what looks like water damage or other items in his report, but specifically looks for wood-destroying organisms like termites or bugs. The bats were in the attic and not found in the routine walk-through. Labelle says if he had done a full-house inspection, he would've seen the bats. That type of inspection covers every room and area of the house, and is a more thorough inspection. Zebulan's mother Patty Coffey says, what they thought was water damage, ended up being bat droppings that soaked through the walls and ceiling. "We got 23 five gallon jugs, five gallon buckets out of there so far. This is just a couple of weeks worth of the bat droppings. I did clean it all up and I went up with boards, so this is just what they've done in the past few weeks." Labelle says a full house inspection is about $150 - $200 dollars more than a pest and dry-rot inspection. We also talked to the broker who sold the house, and he said they always recommend an inspection done before buying a house. A potential buyer has 14 days to renegotiate or back out of the deal without losing money. It's past the 14 day period for Zebulun, so it's a done deal. We will follow up on this story on what can be done to get the bats out of the house. |
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