Originally published at: Homeowner tries to smoke out snakes, but burns down the house instead | Boing Boing
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My grandfather tried to rid his shed of rats that lived under the floorboards using gelignite.
To be fair, he did get rid of the rats.
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The baltimore local station article says " the property records show was purchased in 2014 for $1.85 million."
A house purchased for nearly 2 million and the owner wouldn’t pay for a professional?! And you know the insurance company is going to refuse to pay. If the owner was paying for insurance at all.
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Don’t do this at home or to your home kids.
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A gentleman in my city used a propane torch to get rid of spiderwebs in the basement. That set his house on fire.
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But he got rid of the spiderwebs, didn’t he…
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They probably got rich by not wasting their hard earned cash on frivolous stuff like avocado toast and licensed exterminators.
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Nobody is sure what happened to the snakes.
I think we can be sure. One of two defined things - much more likely to be one rather than the other.
(Hint: There are more snakes out in the wild now.)
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Oh, FFS.
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There are few people more apt to pinch pennies for the most ridiculous things than the wealthy. (IMO it comes from the feeling of being entitled to your money, and thus the idea of giving it to someone else for performing a job for you being downright offensive.)
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G’night, everybody, thread’s done
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Man, now I’m sad that my CA home doesn’t have a basement. We’ve got enough greenery and some fruit trees, and no matter how well our resident owl eats, we always seems to have rats and mice wandering about (have been able to keep them out of the house, but…). I’d welcome a den of snakes at this point.
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Wealthy people, especially those who came from nothing, can be incredible tight wads.
Though WHY would you leave it unattended??? Makes me wonder if he burned it down for the insurance money 
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I don’t think there’s any tangible difference there. Different reasoning and different affects behind the stingyness, but the behaviour is eerily similar.
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I don’t leave the house if the toilet is still running, I just can’t even.
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So if everything had gone according to plan, and he hadn’t burnt the house down, his intention was to fill the house with woodsmoke until it was so unpleasant it drove the snakes off? This is a very, very stupid person.
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I hope the snakes got out!
(Also: using coals to produce smoke? Carbon monoxide, sure, but smoke, not so much.)
Two possibilities: a) they actually intended to burn down the house and this was just a lame excuse, b) the smoke (and CO) would need to be at dangerous levels in the immediate vicinity to have any impact on the spaces in the walls (it would also pretty much render the house uninhabitable for quite a while…) - there’s a reason why, normally, when you’re trying to smoke something out, you produce smoke outside the area, where you can tend to it, and blow it into the region you want to saturate.
Whatever they were actually trying to do, it was dumb on multiple levels, basically.
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My first thought was that smoke rises and snakes are going to be the last to be bothered. This person is a poor planner.
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The AI filter in my brain was about 85% confident this was a circuit board:
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Perhaps the ground itself has some value?
