Drywall

by Kirsten
(Kentucky, USA)

I was rooming with two friends in a four-bedroom house. The upstairs had a spare room with no door and as I had two ferrets and the house had tons of closet space for storage, my friends agreed that it would be a perfect room just for my fuzzies.

So I took all the precautions-- 3' pet gate made of solid wood, duct tape coated with bitter apple over outlets, boarded up the bottom of the closet door, laid down all kinds of ferret-safe bedding, litterboxes in all corners... the works. And that was a great setup for the three months my two fuzzies (Suki and Loki) occupied that room.

Then one day I brought home two ferrets (dubbed #319 and #320, sadly) from a neighboring county's humane society. Boy, were they happy. And watching Archie and Loki "fight" it out for dominance was one of the most amazing (and amusing) things I've ever seen.

However, that night, I was downstairs when I heard something that sounded like something heavy had fallen in the ferrets' room. My boyfriend was with me, and we both raced up the stairs to find a HUGE hole in the drywall. The place looked like it had been patched up before, but it seemed sturdy enough (I'd checked to make sure) and the other fuzzies never had a problem of it.

But Archie was missing, and I didn't know what that crashing noise was. The house was an old colonial-style, and thus had a lot of space between the walls of the upstairs rooms and the end of the roofing. So it seemed that either I had heard the dry wall falling out, or something much worse.

I just knew it was Archie, as he was the only one unaccounted for. I knew he had fallen through the floor behind the wall or something terrible. I had to sit on the stairs and wait for my boyfriend to carefully crawl through the crawlspace with a flashlight. He couldn't find him. But, after a few moments of dread and calling his name and squeaking toys, Archie crawled out. He was covered in cobwebs and dust, but he was okay.

So, be CAREFUL about dry wall -- especially places that have been patched. My Archie could have fallen to his death, eaten something he shouldn't have, been bitten by a poisonous spider, stepped on a nail -- any number of things.

In the end we had to re-patch the wall and block that section off completely. They never got in again, though, try as Archie might. ;-)