By: Derek Chang

Have you ever had to deal with rats? I just did. A rat hole was discovered in our garage a few days ago, and today my mom asked me to help her fix the rat problem.

My mom had described the rat hole as being humongous. However, when my mom showed me the rat hole, I was pretty surprised to see that the rat hole she was talking about wasn’t that big at all. I realized she meant the hole was larger than previous holes. I thought it was as big as one of those rat holes in cartoons.

At The Home Depot, my mom explained to me that there were two effective ways of fixing rat holes, as she’d seen in a video. We decided to go for using steel wool, because the rats would chew on the other type of material, and my mom was afraid that over a few nights, the rats would break it and get out of the hole again. We bought a staple gun, staples, and some steel wool.

During the car ride, I tried to take out the staple gun from its packaging, but it was too hard. Back at home, my mom managed to open the package.

We tried to figure out how to use the staple gun, but ran into two issues. The first one was that after we put the staples in, we couldn’t put the cap back. It kept getting stuck on something. After we solved that problem, we realized the handle would only go down a little and get stuck. My mom eventually figured out you needed to push on the handle really hard.

My mom then showed me how to fix the rat problem. She told me to take a clump of steel wool and give it to her. She went on to put the steel wool in the hole, because rats don’t like to chew on steel wool and it would prevent the rats from getting out of the hole. She stapled it to the wall so the rats couldn’t just push it out of the hole. My mom put a lot of staples to make sure the steel wool didn’t fall out. After we checked that there were no holes between the steel wool and the wall, we went back home.

I had a fun time helping my mom fix the rat problem by covering up the rat hole. I hope I can help my mom with more things like this.