Looks like mouse droppings mixed with nesting material. Or insect activity. Call pest control, they will know.

^ this

did you not have an inspection?

Based on the condition of the floor and surrounding baseboards, i'm guessing the house wasn't kept very clean. Attics often attract mice and rats. if you have any holes in the ceiling, it's going to drop through.

Pest control is just going to set traps. you can do that yourself. bugs are something diff, but rats and mice get traps. don't do poisonous bait because those animals are food for other animals and it will kill them too. (don't do glue traps. those are just extremely inhumane. and every critter gets stuck to it) heavy snap traps are quick, easy and cheap. (nail the traps to the joists or large pieces of wood. sometimes it doesn't kill them immediately and they hop around w/the trap attached to their body part. Ask me how I know all of this. ;)

The main thing is to fill up the gaps on the outside of the house around the roof line. that's where they get in.

I agree, and its a large infestation too.

Wear a mask please. Definitely rodent

WHOA.....................big time rodents!!! You never made a trip up to that attic? No inspector made a trip up? At this point I'd not want to go up. Call the pest exterminator, and your exterior is also in need of a major look. By a pro. Probably some major caulking is in order.

I bet your realtor provided the "inspection".......or you waived it to get a price. Bad ideas both.

I used the seller’s inspection report that was made in August. The report seemed good and I had inspections on only foundation and plumbing.

Get an exterminator in promptly.

I'd get ANOTHER inspection for every single inch......and the exterminator . Pronto

Important as well to access damage to wiring and insulation and obviously the attic’s base and your ceiling. Will also need to figure out their access and seal up asap.

Yes, definitely look at all the wiring in the attic.

If you have a face shield (like the disposable ones they sold for covid), that will help protect your face if you have to be under that mess as you get it cleaned out. In addition to the other protection.

I agree, a mask is going to be necessary in there, while you are cleaning up. The wiring up in the attic, or anything else that is up there, needs to be thoroughly inspected. Since there is insulation up there, that insulation is contaminated. There is no way, it couldnt be, with that amount of droppings, that they are dropping out of the ceiling. Insulation will be full of urine and feces. It should be all removed, and then an electrician in to inspect all the wiring up there, and when the rodent activity is all over, then all new insulation.

Its too late now, but, remember if you ever buy another house, you find your own inspector, not the sellers, or a realtors inspector, and have things thoroughly inspected.

A pest control company just came in to check, she said it is caused by carpenter ants.

Yikes! Here you go:

https://www.pestworld.org/pest-guide/ants/carpenter-ants/

I have/had carpenter bees which also tunnel through the wood. They will eat your house! (Not sure how much damage the ants cause.) I am replacing a lot of cedar siding and eaves and plugging their tunnels in a lot of other parts of the house exterior. Nobody wants to work on my house exterior so I am doing it myself. They are afraid of the bees even though they are unlikely to bite, as far as I know. It’s awful! Get one of those clear plastic face shields if you have to be the one who works on your house.

I *think* they are mostly gone now that I have repaired and sealed the most vulnerable parts. Or they may have moved to other locations that I haven’t gotten to yet.

To evict them, I used a spray foam that is directed into the tunnels the bugs make. The product I used is for carpenter bees. I don’t know what you use for carpenter ants.

If they are anything like the bees, you’ll want to take measures to ensure they won’t come back. For me, that was sealing the wood with a thick solid acrylic siding stain. The bees don’t like to tunnel through that. I don’t know how you treat interior wood so that ants will be discouraged from coming back.

Carpenter ants in my area generate sawdust that looks like the dust from a saw. Which they dump out of nest entry holes same as soil particles ejected by ants that live in the ground. Regarding what is in your picture it is photographed from too far away to tell real well what it actually is.

The seller's disclosue report written about the place I am in now had "have no knowledge" written in the asbestos section. Month after I moved in I paid for an asbestos survey, turned out the ugly vinyl floor covering on the majority of the floor area was high in asbestos.

The sellers were here for 37 years, so either never realized what they were walking on (and vacuuming) was or the "have no knowledge" was a lie.

Speaking of rats in the attic the two attics and the crawl space turned out to have been full of them in the past. Because the sellers had two small bird feeders set up in the front yard, through which they had been running full sized garbage cans worth of seed.

I paid $7800 to have the attics and crawl space cleaned, the insulation replaced and holes plugged. In the process it was noticed that a water pipe in the crawl space was leaking, plumbers were called afterward to fix that.

When I first looked the house over I opened both attic accesses and the one crawl space access, looked with a flashlight from the openings without going in. And missed thereby what was actually nightmare scenarios.

Fresh looking black plastic had been laid on the ground in the crawl space. First inspection by pest control company revealed that a hellscape lay hidden beneath.

Does not look like insect activity, but then, there are a gazillion different varieties of insects. A few mice can make a big mess. My advice is to go to the attic and look. My favorite traps are the electric ones. They are (supposedly) painless to the mice and the dead mouse can be dumped out (to wherever) without you having to touch it. For bait, use peanut butter.

We hired an exterminator who just set a bunch of traps (not the electric one) and told us we had either white-footed mice or deer mice (they look pretty similar, and I've never inspected the dead mice carefully enough to know which I have). It cost a bunch of money and we ended up just buying traps ourselves. They tend to come in in the spring or fall, so in the summer they might not have been there. We keep traps out (the pet-safe electric kind) all year and in each spring and fall catch a few. Once we started doing that, we had no more symptoms of mouse incursion (debris, scratching noises in the walls).

You want to inspect your attic, because if you have squirrels, it's probably the result of a biggish hole. Tiny mice can squeeze through amazingly tiny spaces.

I would be really tempted to get a second opinion - it really does not look like what carpenter ants generate (at least from the photo)

I would also be looking for a second opinion. This does not look like carpenter ants, it looks more like rodent. If it does turn out to be carpenter ants, then you have a whole other problem, because, they chew like termites and destroy the wood. Rodents might be a lot easier to take care of problems, than capenter ants.

We had carpenter ants in our cabin some time ago and you will see a little hole in the woodwork with sawdust around it. My husband sprayed the woodwork where the holes were and we had no more trouble. Carpenter ants are not near as invasive as termites. We have had them and they can ruin furniture where the ants do not. Your picture looks like something is chewing up your insulation.

I've had to deal with carpenter ant infestations twice. What you show in your picture is not the work of carpenter ants.

Take a look at the photos. Anything look similar?

From my limited (thank heavens) experience with carpenter ants, I say no. That looks like poop.

https://www.solutionsstores.com/how-to-identify-pest-by-droppings

You said you had a home inspection. I don't know how the inspector missed this mess. Even the corner in your photo looks suspicious.

Get a good pest pro in ASAP. Clean up is going to be expensive and you will want the pro to keep you on his calendar and you should expect to see him at least 4 times a year.

No, non of them looks similar to the photos.

No, i didnt have a home inspection. the seller had and i used their report.

Carpenter ants ruined a relatively young metal roof to the tune of $40K (the roof should have otherwise lasted us another 50-60 years). We had to have all the rotten wood underneath replaced, and chopped down a tree where they were living in the trunk.

Now we have to get the outer edges of the house sprayed once a quarter. Apparently the ants will never stop trying. We opted for the most eco friendly company we could find (or at least the least scary chemicals that still do the job, I know none of it is perfect). Which means we have their assurance that at least the spray is not harmful to birds or other small animals. It has been over five years and not a single ant inside.

I don't know how much you want to pursue this legally, but the seller's inspector may not have had your best interest at heart. After all, you weren't paying him. I am also surprised that your real estate agent didn't advise you to get your own inspector. What ever the infestation is, it is not something new. A home inspection has to include the readily accessible exposed portions of the structure of the home, including the roof, the attic, walls, ceilings, floors, windows, doors, basement, and foundation. I don't see how he missed this mess. Good luck.

I would never use a sellers inspection report. For all you know it could have been their "uncle bob" who wrote it.

don't know if it's too late for someone else, but I'd have another inspeciton done and see if they match. You may have a lot of unseen issues.

Uncle Bob.........don't ask Uncle Bob to do anything, ever : ) It will cost you big bucks.

If that is mice,  the odor is unmistakable.  I can tell a house with a mouse problem as soon as I open the door although my husband says he can't smell them.  No matter what the source,  there is a major cleanup job ahead.