A week or so ago, I woke up to scrambling and mewing from our hall bathroom. This is the bathroom that we remodeled about a year ago…
AND the one that let loose a torrent of water into our home interior about six months ago…
At least this the excuse for why I had never replaced the piece of plywood that allows access to the wet-wall and shower/tub cut off valves.
Unfortunately, mice discovered that this provides direct access into our linen closet. A warm, fuzzy, dark location that can not be reached by our cats. Not that our cats are such a great deterrent (more on this in a minute), but the mice don’t know they’re lousy hunters… so I’ve always assumed that the smell of the fearsome predators would keep the mice out of the living quarters. As a house in the relative country, the idea of keeping mice completely out of the house is pretty much too much to ask for (especially because the house was well infested when we moved in… there are just too many access points we don’t know about).
That said, we have maybe one incident a year where a stray field mouse gets lost in the interior and our ferocious felines chase it around the house. Often cornering, often swatting, but never catching, killing, eating or removing. Oh no. Apparently that’s my job.
So there I was at 3 AM armed with my usual mouse hunting gear: shoes (I’m afraid of them biting my feet), a long stick for probing in corners (in this case the plunger) and a box for scooping up the rubbed-out rodent. I’ve dispatched the critter and Shadow is sniffing at it and looking at me as if to say “Now look what you’ve done, you broke it!” Just as I’m cleaning up the corpse… zing… out from behind the toilet comes #2. Great.
So since then we’ve noticed Shadow spending a lot of time poking in the closet and in the bathroom. Finally, it occurred to us that the open wall to the linen closet was like hanging out a Vacancy sign. Thankfully, we didn’t find any nests or obvious damage in the linens… but there was ample “signs” of the presence of the little scurrying varmints.
So now the wall is closed, the snap rings have been secured with silicon adhesive, and the mice have been left several convenient blocks of rodent last meal. Or should I say just desserts? I’ve been avoiding this solution for the sake of the cats, but then the cats don’t eat the mice… they just chase them around. In either case, we’ll keep an eye on them.
February 4th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Living in a 100+ year old home without a full basement wall, we also occasionally get mice (particularly the day it first gets cold outside). I’ve been told they can get through a space that you couldn’t put your finger into, so finding all the access points may be a fruitless exercise for anyone.
Anyway, ours come into the kitchen, although never by the food. Their first spots are the junk drawer and the silverware drawer. So, when we see signs we a) wash all the silverware and b) put the best mousetrap ever in the drawer instead.
I bought this at Lowe’s after several trying several other products (including poison out of the dogs reach, but that was then stored by the mice in a spot the dogs found–not a fun experience). It’s a battery-operated box with a flip top lid. You put bait at the back. The mouse comes in, and when it has it’s feet on both plates, it gets electrocuted. The box then blinks to tell you the mouse is there, and you (in our case, Todd), open the flip top lid and dump it out. Fast, convenient, and no mess.
February 4th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Joe’s college roommate, Ted, favored a very (in my opinion) inhumane, but extremely effective mouse-eliminating technique. They lived in a craphole college-guy apartment that was actually missing a few hunks of wall where rodents could basically just enter at will. Anyway, Ted used to grind up a glass bottle or jar or whatever into a very fine powder. He’d ball up the glass with peanut butter into small portions and drop the pea-sized bits around the various mouse-likely locations in the place. The theory was that the mice ingest the peanut butter/glass combo, begin bleeding internally and exit the house looking for a water source, dying out in the wild somewhere. We never saw a dead mouse around the apartment and evidence of live mice dropped considerably, so I’m going to say it worked. But the idea of it bothered the animal-lover in me quite a bit.
February 4th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
poison causes internal bleeding too, so Ted probably had discovered a cheaper way (assuming he used store-brand peanut butter without a lot of actual peanuts in it)…
February 4th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
why are my posts 2 hours ahead of CST? Am I in a time warp?
February 4th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I considered the glass-peanut butter technique actually, but the poison has an antidote of sorts in high concentrations of vitamin K. You can’t fix mechanically damaged internal organs. I don’t know, perhaps clotting agent would work in both cases…
Lisa: The web-server time was off by an hour, this has been corrected (probably I’ll be off by an hour after DST too). Not sure why you were off by two.
February 4th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
It usually shows my post in your time, not mine, so it is an hour ahead of my time when the web-server is correct.