An Engineering Problem
A few days ago my gray cat brought in a chipmunk, and it escaped by going into the broken vent by the sun porch door, (the previous owners had made louvers of thin strips of mirror, and of course one broke, leaving a chipmunk-sized gap.) I had hoped the chipmunk would just come out on it's own eventually (I had a mole do that in New Jersey) but no, it was very quiet, and then yesterday I noticed a ...smell...in the hallway. A very unique smell of a small mammal decomposing. And it was coming from the heater vent in the hall, which you can see as the hole in the wall in the photo above. At first I thought there must be an access panel downstairs, but no. This is the underside of that duct and vent: No access panel, and no room to work even if there was one; it's also by a poorly-placed gas line. So whatever I was going to do, was going to have to be done by reaching into the vent hole, which was shaped like a J. I found a flashlight with a super-bright LED and a mirror from m...