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Mice Update, Part 2

Bill from Enon Hall wanted to know what that trap thing in the last post was.  It is a Tomcat Mouse Trap that I saw in Menards and elected to try. 

I hate setting traditional mouse traps.  So this one, with its easier one hand setting, seemed interesting.

I had explored the kitchen and found a gap between the floor and baseboard under the radiator that opened down into the subfloor under the kitchen.  Along with setting the Tomcats along the baseboards (the conventional wisdom is that mice run along the walls), I decided to fill the cracks between the floor and the baseboard with some Great Stuff.  (As discussed on the houseblogs.net community forum, Great Stuff is the duct tape of this generation.)

And that, I figured, was that.  Either I had shut down the "on ramp" for the house mouse kitchen highway or the Tomcats would get 'im.  All I had to do was wait.

And wait I did.

Until the other night when I was typing away in the dining room and I heard Aaron stage whisper, "I SEE IT!"

I looked up as he stood frozen in the kitchen doorway, staring at the back wall near the door.

"What?  What do you see?"

"The mouse."

"Shut UP!  It is 7:00 pm at night, all of the lights are on and we are making a ton of noise!  There is not a mouse in the kitchen!"

"Tell him that.  He doesn't seem to be bothered by it."

Of course, by the time I grabbed the camera and bolted to the kitchen doorway, the mouse had disappeared.  We searched for it and then Aaron grabbed a flashlight and found this:

This is where an exterior wall USED to be until a sagging back porch was cobbled onto the house in the last few decades.  They took the exterior wall out, put in a door and left this gaping hole between the kitchen floorboards and what use to be the base of the exterior wall.  This was not only a hole to the subfloor. It leads to the outside of the house under the sagging porch.

And it is directly under the baby's high chair.  The high chair she flings Cheerios off of each morning.  These mice must have been doing little mouse high fives when Grace came on the scene.  Because I sweep the floor clean before going to bed each night, the mice have become desperate which explained our early evening visitor.

We debated whether to fill up the hole with Great Stuff right away, or use alternative traps to test out whether this really was the mouse doorway or another false alarm.  Being morbidly curious, Aaron went to the hardware store to fetch the old-fashioned thirty nine cent mouse traps that our families used to use.

(To be continued...)

Posted by jeanne on October 11, 2006 at 10:25 PM (7)

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