Despite the fact that we have been in the roofing business for over 37 years, there are still some issues we find that take us by surprise. One of our customers with a home in an upscale Virginia (VA) neighborhood called us one day complaining of strange noises coming from her attic and requested tile roof repair.
When we got to the house, the home owner described rustling sounds coming from overhead on the top part of her house. The home is quite large, with a finished attic used as a playroom for her kids. Between this room and the roof is a short crawl space.
Our crew did a thorough examination of the crawl space but everything appeared to be intact. The gable end vents and upper roof vents had been carefully screened over to prevent critters from getting inside. We didn’t even find a spider.
The next option was to go up to the roof. She had a spectacular finish on her home-very expensive handmade Spanish clay barrel tiles. A couple of us inspected the roof and before long discovered the problem. In this part of the state, mice are prolific and so are their predators. A family of mice-eating black snakes had decided to take up residence in the channels created by the barrel tiles. They are harmless, but startling to see because of their length – 6 feet for a mature adult.
We didn’t actually need to do any tile roof repair. It took some time but we got the snakes to vacate the roof. Using roofing screen, we sealed off the tiles to make sure the snakes would not return.
