[apatil]

Two questions for people who live in rural areas in homes that were built in a more modern way.

- Do you have issues with pests? More precisely, how often do you have to use mousetraps or call an exterminator?

- What's your recurring home maintenance schedule like?

Two things that really bother me about American-style homes are the seemingly rapid deterioration and the failure to design out pests. It's easy for a stick-frame building to develop a defect sufficient to allow mouse ingress, and once inside, the hollow walls afford them many inaccessible places to nest. I really hate having to regularly kill, or at best relocate and traumatize, creatures that are just looking for a safe place to spend the winter. I have imagined that European-style concrete buildings, with tight-fitting prefab components, would be easier to own, but I have never actually asked anyone with a comparably located home.