I’ll cut straight to the chase, which is an ironic choice of words given the current circumstances; I have a mouse problem.
I bought this house six years ago, and early on I had seen signs of mice. Droppings above the ceiling tiles while pulling cables, tufts of insulation pulled from the ceiling in the laundry room…and at one point a mouse running across the floor of my basement office. ‘Office’ may be a stretch of terminology…it’s really the room where the xbox lives.
Venting to the neighbour, I found out that mice have been a problem with every prior owner since the house was built eighteen years ago. Repeating their mistakes, I did as they had done and called an exterminator. What the exterminator doesn’t tell you is that they don’t actually get rid of the problem, they just ‘evict’ the current rodent residents. Mice gaining entry into my home is still my problem. I had work ahead of me.
Know thy enemy.
With my limited understanding of how the mind of a mouse actually works, I recapped my findings. First off, I noticed they didn’t actually take any food from the house. No dog food, nothing from the pantry. In fact, they don’t even seem to come upstairs at all. All of their droppings were found in the basement, more specifically above the ceiling tiles in my office xbox room.
Over the span of a few years, I had set traps on both the main level and across the basement, but noticed that I’d only ever caught them in the xbox room, which happens to also be the front corner of the house. That led me outside to scan the exterior walls.
Nothing.
Well, almost nothing. The exterior walls were like a Johnson & Johnson dermatology product – clean, clear, and under control. However, the concrete approach to the door had small holes in the ground where the sidewalk meets the grass. A lot of holes. The kind of holes a village of mice would make to their underground secret society.
This prompted me to realize that there was only one remaining spot to find the point of entry. A spot that was such a pain in the ass that explained why no one had done this prior. I had to open the basement wall in the office xbox room to find a potential hole in the foundation. And as far-fetched as that sounded, I found that damn hole.
There were two huge-ass bolts coming through the foundation wall that apparently bolt the concrete front slab at the front door to the house, and one of those bolt holes had enough room for a Lincoln Continental to pull through. The insulation in the wall told the entire story. Eighteen years of mouse poop proved this was their entry/exit spot. And this is exactly why no one had found it before – no one was willing to tear the walls apart.
In some way, I’ve been using this as a success story to my wife in justifying my rage. Sometimes taking a sawzall to a wall out of pure frustration can solve an eighteen-year-old mystery. You just need the right amount of anger mixed with the perfect amount of determination. Needless to say, the traps have stayed empty for about a full month now, and the office xbox room is almost ready to be stitched back together. Which leads me to an entirely new problem.
Does anyone know a good drywaller, mudder and taper?
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