Points of Entry

Interesting Mouse Fact: A female may have five to 10 litters of usually five or six babies each in one year (http://www.idph.state.il.us/envhealth/pchousemouse.htm).

Death Toll: 7

We have been successful in another battle against the mice.  We employed the redundancy scheme the following night but to no avail.  The traps were left unmolested.  However, last Tuesday night, Geoffrey once again set out two traps in the same location.  I am starting to call the area ground zero, otherwise known as our pantry.  We have been using the peanut butter and I am convinced that this is a very good bait.  When we woke up on Wednesday morning, both traps were not only tripped, but they had also caught two mice.  One brown mouse and one grey mouse.  

Points of Entry

One article I was reading regarding house mice said you must discover points of entry the mice are using to access your living spaces.  This house is a veritable Swiss cheese of entry points for our furry friends.  I went  down the hallway alone and found no fewer than seven mouse doorways.  These doorways are tiny holes at the base of the wall.  The hallway has never had baseboards and so the sheet rock is easy for the mice to nibble through.  Geoffrey and I researched what could be done to help this situation since installing new baseboards is not in the current family budget.  It was suggested that anywhere you find these small holes, fill them with steel wool.  Mice can not chew through the fibers and so it effectively seals the doorway.  So I now have a hallway that is literally polka dotted with dark grey spots where the wall meets the carpet.

On the day we moved in three months ago, we had been cleaning our daughters "new" closet and had found one of these holes.  However the hole in her closet was much larger and surrounded by mouse poop and urine.  We cleaned up the excrement and found we had enough scrap baseboards to seal up that hole.  It would have been too big to use the steel wool trick.  So far our blockades appear to be holding since I haven't found balls of steal wool pushed out into the middle of the carpet.

One of the additional joys of living in this old country house is that we can not adhere to a set of consistent decorating norms.  Everything in this house is and always has been a hodgepodge of left over materials.  My parents business is interiors(wall/window/floor coverings) and so the house is a mosaic of materials from 20+ years of jobs.  So seeing baseboards of one style in our daughters room, no baseboards in the hallway, and a different style of baseboards in the kitchen is just par for the course in this house.  Furthermore, since we are living here in an attempt to save money and find a more secure financial footing, spending money to change these varieties just doesn't seem to make sense.  So for now, we will live with grey polka dotted hallways and continue to search for other points of entry.