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Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Mice... Mice... Mice... And Projects!

I've found it helps if I call them all "Gus-Gus" (movie reference, anyone?). Reid brought home traps Monday evening and we set two upstairs, two in the lower kitchen cabinet and two in the garage. Before we went to bed Monday evening, we had already escorted two mice out of the kitchen. When we got up the next morning, there were two more in the kitchen traps, and two in the garage. None upstairs (thanks, no doubt, to Isabel!).

So, I let all four of them go in the field down the road from us... last night the two in the kitchen and one in the garage were closed. So I walked them all down the road in the cold only to find that the mice had somehow closed them but they were all empty!

And this morning we had two more in the kitchen and one more in the garage (still none upstairs! Isabel is working overtime). I'm walking them over half a mile away from the house but I fear that it is not enough and that it is possible that the same mice are just coming back... otherwise, we're invested (considering if you've kept count that is two caught in a sherbet container and nine caught in humane traps... we're close to ten, but haven't yet got to my 20, which was a number drawn completely out of the air). I almost hope that it's just the same mice over and over... Jamie, if you're waiting to visit until we have no mice I fear that you'll never be visiting.

So, this evening Reid and I are going to rip down one of the shelves in the garage (they're made out of press board, which he doesn't want for shelves) and cover the holes under the kitchen cabinets, which should drastically cut down on the mouse population in there (mainly because once we cover them I'm going to leave a cabinet open... they're all interconnected which means if Isabel can get into one she can get into all of them and I'd much rather have Isabel in the cabinets with my dishes than mice... there's nothing worse than having to wash your dishes before and after you use them!). And when perusing other people's suggestions online of how to rid your home of mice, the number one suggestion was to get a cat! If there was any doubt whether or not we would always have a cat, the mice have just sealed the deal!

And in other news, here are the two small tasks Reid and I have tackled in the last two evenings.

We hung the mirror that Reid's parents gave us in the dining room and it looks great! It makes the 11X22 room look even bigger than before!


And we hung the mirror in our bedroom (ignore the curtains reflected in the mirror... One of my projects for this summer while in DC is to find inexpensive curtain material and make new curtains for most of the windows of the house)!


And we hung shelves in the laundry room... now I just need to put stuff on them. They're light-weight bearing shelves, so it will mostly be toilet paper, paper towels and the like... but every bit of storage helps! Then I need to paint and then rehang the cabinet doors (the open spaces you can just barely see at the bottom) and then the laundry room will be done! Hooray!

5 comments:

Alice said...

Cinderella.

amy said...

Did you have a problem hanging the laundry shelves? They look like the kind we put up in the kitchen...the kind that said we could just "push in" the nails into the holes-drilled-into-the-walls. I'm just wondering if we were the incompetent ones who needed to break out a sledgehammer to nail them in, or if they're just defective. (I'm leaning toward the former, really.)

Otherwise, looking good!

JayD said...

I have visions of the old movie called "The Incredible Journey" with these mice surviving many mishpas to return to the safety of the kitchen.

Anonymous said...

I think you should dip the mice's feet in paint (perhaps in the bottom of trap) -- not to make tracks, but so that if you get a paint-covered mouse, you'll know it's one of the "old friends".

Anonymous said...

I said I would wait until Isabel establishes her dominance. It appears she has done just that upstairs, which is where I would be sleeping anyway, so I can come visit.