Mousing Adventures

I have to start this post by first introducing my dog, Lucy, to the blog world because she has an integral role in this story and I’m sure she’ll be making regular occurrences on here since she is pretty much the star of the show at our house.

Lucy is a Cairn Terrier that has a rough life of sleeping in the sun and laying on the most fluffy and soft surfaces possible:

So, obviously the dog is pretty laid back.

usually.

Lately she’s been more alert and has been spending her days staring at the stove and refrigerator:

We just thought it was funny at first that she was so interested in the stove. Until one day last week Brandon saw a mouse run from the stove to the fridge. I shook it off at first and, because I always seem to assign names to everything, jokingly named the mouse “Francis.”

Lucy just stared at “Francis” for the next couple days and things were ok.

Then one night when I was making dinner I could smell “Francis.”

turns out, Francis has friends.

We pulled out the stove drawer and found that they had nested in our potholders and were stealing lucy’s food and taking it under the stove! That’s probably the real reason why Lucy was spending her days staring the stove…she was really longing for all of her stolen food under there…

Anyway, by this time it is 9 oclock and neither Brandon nor I want to go out and get something to take care of this issue. So, naturally, we turn to google and find out how to make this little contraption:

Basically we took a drinking glass, smeared some peanut butter on the bottom of it (mice can’t resist peanut butter) and propped it up with a quarter. Francis and friends will smell the peanutty goodness, go under the glass and put their little mice hands up against the glass to get the peanut butter and bam! quarter knocks over and the glass traps the mouse.

The next morning I wake up and hear glasses tinkering downstairs. We go down to find not only Francis, but one of his friends as well under the glasses.  All four glasses had fallen, but somehow they escaped two of the traps:

Brandon took the mice and dropped them off by his work….on the other side of the highway.

We tried the same tactic again the next night and were unsuccessful. No mice were trapped…maybe there were only two?

Unfortunately it couldn’t be that easy. We came home after being out for just a couple hours to find Lucy’s food sprawled across the floor by the stove.

Francis was still there. This called for some serious action.

Saturday night was our mouse intervention. We pulled out the stove and fridge looking for any holes or cracks, plus a thorough sanitizing to remove all of the detritus Francis n’ Friends left for us.

Aside from mice loving peanut butter, we also learned that they hate peppermint. After we cleaned all the spaces we drenched cottonballs in peppermint extract and left those scattered about beind the appliances.

When we pulled back the fridge we found the culprit:

The mice had found a way in through the capped water line.

Our next step was to plug up any and all cracks and holes where the mice could get through. We used steel wool to stuff all the areas.

After three hours of cleaning, minting, and stuffing the kitchen, we felt pretty accomplished on our mousing intervention. Things were cleaned and the whole place smelled minty fresh. We even bought a real trap when we were out that day and set it by the fridge just in case.

The next morning, no signs of mice! Things are looking good, right? Lucy will be able to go back to spending her days on her fluffy blanket….

2 hours later, Brandon sees Francis scurry across the floor and go down into the return air grille.

**sigh** the mousing adventures continue….

Have you had mice problems? What has worked for you?