It's that time of year again: mice madness. So far the kitchen floor trapping total is 7. These all are smallish, half-grown white-footed mice of exactly the same size. Like, a litter. Like, mom and dad mouse said, "Kids, why don't you head on up to the kitchen and get yourselves a snack?"
As we were walking out to release the little bastards down by the creek, Isaac said, "Mom– there's no reason to be scared of mice. They're just little fur-covered balls of fur." To which I replied, "They are little fur-covered balls of ick!" And this amused him no end, so that's what we've been calling the mice lately. Little fur-covered balls of ick.
The new kitchen is being built off-site as we speak. Our builder is a genius of his craft and all is looking on track. We hope that in three weeks or so the off-site piece will be complete and he will come and rip out our existing mess and put in the new. I am now spending my erstwhile free time studying cup pulls and single basin sinks.
I mentioned the whole mouse problem to the builder, and showed him as exhibit A this lovely little door the mice had gnawed in some molding he put around the new dishwasher a while back. It's like a door on Tom and Jerry, only real and slightly more shallow. He was appalled. He studied the situation and said, "They chewed through three-quarter board! Just regular mice???" I explained that they are the slightly more vigorous white footed mouse, but yes, mice. I asked whether he could put metal flashing along the baseboards or something like that, to discourage them. He said that we must patch up all the holes in the basement where they are getting in, stop the flow, and poison the rest.
It could be that he is right. Although the task of patching all nickel-sized and larger holes in our basement is beyond daunting. Although it's clear that the basement is much younger than the living room (177 years old), it's still not what you would call young. I was just down there looking at the situation and I think short of skim-coating the entire place with cement, it will be impossible to go the route of sealing them out. Still, it wouldn't hurt to discourage them by shutting down the obvious super highways and byways, and I'll look into that.
The next question is poison, yea or nay? On the plus side, it would kill them. On the negative, they might crawl in the walls and die and stench things up; the poison might sicken or kill our cat, who eats at least some mice and who lives in the basement most of the time; and lastly there's always the risk that a certain little toddler would get his hands on it somehow. I'm not all the comfortable with poison. Lethal trapping? But the blood and the screams and the canibalism we got all too familiar with at our Cleveland house… pure horror show… So what does that leave? Live trapping, non-toxic, which we do now, and perhaps some attempt at preventing entree into the house in the first place. The only downsides there are the blatantly minimal effectiveness, the infinite supply of mice, and the hassle of then dealing with the mice you catch.
On a related topic, I spent all of Sunday and Monday flat-out convinced that there was a varmint in the heating ducts someplace. We heard unexplained thumping inside the duct, which jangled our nerves during an otherwise lovely moment of sitting by the fire and reading the paper. Indeed, on Sunday morning we heard a strange stirring under the floor of the sunporch, which implied a large furry mammal trying to wedge himself in a small dank place. Then it progressed to the duct thumping. On particularly chilling theory of mine was that our friend the huge snake from the terrace had decided to look for a cozy place to hybernate and had found his way under the house in the crawl space and into or on top of a duct someplace.
At one point I suggested to Isaac that we go downstairs and investigate. He was initially thrilled by the adventure of it, then dismayed that the light at that end of the room was burned out. We heard the thump sound and soon were both so terrified that we ran upstairs like frightened schoolchildren… Isaac has the advantage here, as he actually is a school child. I don't know my excuse. Anyway, my fear of doing laundry and having a large snake leap out at me, or going down to feed the cat and encountering unfamiliar beady eyes glowering at me from the shadows, or finding that something had indeed wedged himself into the duct and then died, only to fill our house with putrescence, caused me to make inquiries.
The animal catching people: we can't open ducts.
The duct cleaning people: we don't catch animals.
Right… so this would mean that you BOTH need to be there at the same time… one dealing with the ducts, and one dealing with the varmint. This logistically challenging and expensive sounding concept stopped my progress completely on Monday.
Luckily, yesterday, it was all cleared up. Perhaps it is our good fortune that our grungy plumbing still harbors bacteria. Yes, sadly we still total coliform positive around here. Will it never end??? The new well, and the $8K, and the 1.4 gallons of Chlorox bleach did not solve it yet… So the Summit County water inspector, whom I've gotten to know much better than I care to lately, was again in our basement, testing the water. So while we were there, I mentioned the whole varmint concern, and just then the ducts went THUMP very loudly right before our eyes. I would've run away like a school girl again, were it not for the obvious explanation: the new well piping is actually sitting on the heating duct, and when the pressure tank turns on, which it does at will, it bonks the duct.
Hurray!
I will now change the name of this blog to This Old House (Special Varmint Edition).