Well, we have a friggin' mouse.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Just turned my head a few hours ago to see a gray blur dart across the pathway in the living room. Great.

He was under a TV tray leaning against the wall; when I moved said tray, whoooshpatterpatterpatter again—this time, I think he ran under the couch.

Well, I tried setting a spare trap we had, and I ended up slamming my thumb in it. They have much more torque than I previously thought. Owie.

So, I constructed a variation on the ‘bucket trap’ in the meantime; I got a #10 can (big coffee can), filled it with soapy water, and I made a cardboard ramp up to the opeing. I taped a peanut butter cracker across the can in the usual manner, hoping that this is good-enough bait.

I should have known something was with those rattling noises I heard the other day. Also, we’ve been having occasional rattling over the past few years inside the wall facing me; this wall faces the attic.

So, this will tide me over until we get some glue traps (eff the mice) and possibly those sonic rodent repellers. Only thing is, I read in a board search that it’s disconcerting to see a mouse on a glue trap. Exactly how disconcerting is this? Does the mouse have a pitiful expression on his face, or is it more gruesome?

Wish me luck.

2

I had mice in my flat recently. Not pleasant. We were told non-lethal traps were worse than useless, and recommend poison. It didn’t work, even when mixed up with cheese and chocolate. In the end it was a case of a visit to the hardware store to pick up some nasty old fashioned traps. Not something that made me feel big or proud, but they worked in less than fifteen minutes (the poison hadn’t in a week). I suspect that my having to remove the bodies was some kind of moral punishment for choosing the violent way out. Not recommended but it did work.

3

When I lived at my parents house there were a lot of mice.

I took a rubbermaid trash container (empty) and put some bird seed in the bottom and left the trash can next to a nightstand with a little seed on it too. By morning I would have 3 or 4 mice all in the can that was too high for them to get back out of. I would then take them to the park and let them go.

I could do this pretty much daily and did so for most of the last few months I lived at home. There were a lot of mice.

4

We had a mouse for about two weeks. Last week it fell into a bucket of water my wife had left in the laundry room and drowned. No more mouse.

I flung it into the woods to be consumed by its peers.

5

We used to have mice running about behind the panelling in our kitchen. There was only one drawer that they could get into from behind the units, and every time that was opened there would be a snowstorm of chewed up bits of paper bags!

One day bits of rotted mouse including a foot came gushing out of the tap at me into my bath - the lid of the water tank in the attic had gone askew and a mouse had gone diving in it. Ew ew ew ewwwwwwwww.

6

Chapter 1:

About a month ago when I was on the golf course my wife called me screaming that a mouse in our bedroom. She was on the bed naked after getting out of the shower and swore she wasn’t going to move until I got home to take care it. I laughed so hard I almost shit myself!

Needless to say I set some traps and killed the little bugger <Evil laugh with my pinky placed at the corner of my mouth>

Chapter 2:

Last night (8/17/03) at approximately 9:22pm

We’re sitting in front of the stupid box watching the mind numbing Stephen King movie when out of the corner of my eye I see a flash near the ceiling.

A F***ING BAT! O_M_G!

I grabbed the blanket we have on our couch and tried in vein to cover the little bugger to no avail. So, I finally used the blanket as God intended it to be used and swatted the bat down to the floor and got my dog on it. Then I proceeded to grab a big top thrill dragster cup we got from Cedar Point this year and whacked the thing dead. Grabbed the tongs from the kitchen and brought it outside where it is currently rotting on the roof of my neighbor’s garage. < Evil laugh with my pinky placed at the corner of my mouth>
Chapter 3:

Not sure yet, but kind of scared about what could possibly be next…

7

I have bats in my neighborhood, but so far none have entered the abode. We have mice every year. Probably a half dozen or so. Borrow a cat, JoeK. You won’t have mice for long!

8

I have an old house with a fieldstone foundation. Lots of nooks and crannies, completely porous to rodents, and as a result, I have a nearly infinite supply of mice. Fortunately they pretty much stay in the foundations and (less fortunately) in the attic. However the cat would regularly bring little playmates up from the cellar and re-release them for its entertainment. Usually in the bedroom at 4:00 AM. For a while I would pry myself out of bed and rescue the victim, but after the nth occurence, I would just roll over and let nature take its violent course. This meant I had to be careful stepping out of bed the next morning, and on one notable occasion, the mouse escaped and I spotted it creeping down the staircase a day later. (The cat noticed it too, and hilarity ensued.)

9

We had mice. We poisoned them. Quick and effective and killed two mice we didn’t even know we had.

10

My parents had 3 cats… I never saw one of them so much as look at a mouse.

11

Joe K, you need to look around your house for possible sources of entry. In older houses not on slabs, there can be many. Almost any hole can allow a mouse in.

Look under your sinks. Where the water and drain pipes go through, are there large openings? Get some mesh tape and quickset and make them as small as you can. After the set is …um… er… set, fill what little opening is left with steel wool and then tub and tile caulk.

That’s one.

Look behind toilet and in other fairly well hidden corners. Include closets in your search. Especially around the baseboards or floors. Patch any holes you find.

That’s two.

Doors. Exterior doors. Proper closing? Weatherstripping intact? Include attic and/or basement doors. May require some basic handyman skills to fix. If find problem, post specifics in GQ.

May as well lok at your windows, too.

That’s three.

Now, the hardest. Your baseboards. The drywall usually won’t go all the way down to the floor. Gaps of a half inch to an inch are not uncommon. If the baseboard also doesn’t reach the floor, there is a prime entrance for rodentboy. This may require some fairly major work.

If you think this the problem, remove the base, carefully cutting the caulk joint first. Take care not to split the wood. Specially shaped prybars for pulling off base are found at Lowe’s/Home Depot/Southerland’s type stores. Use a block of 1X4 to pry against instead of gouging your walls.

Got rot? Crumbling drywall or plaster? Huge (2" or so) gaps at the floor level? Get to some repair. You may find yourself filling in the big gaps with some strips of scrap drywall. You don’t need (or want) it to seal to the floor, but get close. Some oldtimers advocate “insulating” with more steel wool all around the base.

Then, reattatch the base, recaulk, touch up paint. For uneven, wavy floors, you may want to add some quarter round to the base, flexing it so that it reaches the floor.

That’s four.

Check outside for loose siding, damage, piles of junk, etc…

Have I missed anything?

12

Boy, I don’t think so. Thanks a lot.

I don’t know how the danged thing got in—and, as I alluded to before, I wonder if this has been going on for a tad longer than I originally thought.

I have seen on both Board and Google searches the existence of these high-frequency noisemakers that scare away mice, rats etc. and also emit energy through the wires that discourages rodents from inhabiting the walls. I have seen a couple good reviews so far; are these generally accurate, in anyone’s opinion?

13

My personal opinion is that the noisemakers are crap, as they have never worked for anyone I’ve known who has tried them. Plus, I can hear them, and they make me crazy.

The only way I know of to discourage mice is to make your home inaccessible as per NoClueBoy’s excellent instructions… and even then, you may only discourage them. Mice are freakin’ Houdinis when it comes to getting in your house if that’s where they want to be. I once actually watched one squeeze under a door with fully functional weatherstripping.

The trouble with poison is that the critters may up and die somewhere where it’s a major pain in the ass to retrieve them, or in fact somewhere you can’t find, but can smell.

For these reasons, I think traps are the best option. The live-animal ones have worked for us, btw, as have the time-tested, spring-loaded ones. Those can also be pretty gruesome if they catch the critter on the skull. I would not be interested in glue traps because of gruesomeness. Mice are way too cute for being such evil little bastards.

In my experience, the trick is baiting your trap with something the critters like; we’ve had best results with peanut butter and Milky Way bars.

14

Just for future reference you might also want to check into what they were eating. They can get through cardboard and paper easily, but they are also amazing good at getting into things without leaving any obvious signs of entry. Nothing like getting to the bottom of a seemingly intact box of cereal and finding that it had been…visited. Be sure edible stuff is stored in a sealed cabinet. We trapped our family of mice, but were also attempting to starve them out, which makes them easier to trap. After we put away all the obvious food we found that they were eating decorative pine cones and bits of dried PlayDoh.

15

Heh, we had a mouse here once. Atleast that I now of. My cat was on it. She was determined that was going to be lunch. Unfortunately, this girl was at my house who thought it was cruel the way the cat was playing w/it, so she picked it up by it’s tail and set it free outside. Never saw it again tho I think it learned it’s lesson. As for the cat…she’s still grieving over the lost lunch.

16

I found another little bastard (I don’t know if it was the same one; a different color, I think?) in the living room when I was about to crash this morning. Something told me to look behind the speaker in the corner, and lo and behold, there’s a quarter-sized hole in-between the baseboard and the carpet. I shoved half a box of S.O.S. pads in the hole and adjacent hollow space under the baseboard. It’s right by the flowerbed, incidentally.

Upon rigorous recollection, I actually have seen this hole years ago, and thought nothing of it. It was right by where my drums were set up during an improptu jam me and my friends were having. My friend said (I barely recollect) “That’s a mousehole; you better plug that.” I think I said, Yeah, I oughta, then promptly forgot about it. Until now, that is. I’ve a good feeling it was the main one.

17

You should have to deal with Norway Rats, one of the largest breeds in the rat 7and mouse fammilies.

Neighbor (not very good ones, caused lots of problems to neighborhood) were not ‘clean,’ nor congenial, nor had any of the other attributes of good neighbors.

A colony of N.R’s. got established under their house in the crawl space. Came from shopping center 3/4 to 1 mile away.

ONE managed to get into our crawl space and made havoc of the underfloor insulation, got into the wall insulation throughout the house, etc. etc.

Got a “Hava-A-Heart” one ended trap, baited it and trapped it. Had to fill a tall garbage can with water and drown the bugger. Too big and mean to attempt any other method without blood and carnage.

There is a mechanical trap that attracts mice and when the enter the first chamber the mechanism ‘spanks’ it and pushed it into the holding chamber. Still leaves the little buggers to be drowned or released to custody of the cat.

18

You definitely need to get a couple of snakes to deal with your mouse problem.

Of course, if the snakes start breeding, you’ll need to get some cats to control the situation.

Just make sure the cats are “fixed,” though, or you’ll need to get a pack of dogs to trim the burgeoning feline population.

After that, things could get a bit messy. Goats and cows, in that order, are usually prescribed as the next lines of defense. Whatever happens, though, do not – I repeat, do NOT – get a horse!

Barry

19

My parents dealt with a mouse problem recently. My dad woke up one night to find something skittering down his arm. Mom swore he was imagining things, but sure enough, they started seeing mice around the house a few days later. It turns out that, overnight, the mice were stealing cat food out of the dishes in the kitchen and taking it to their nest under the living room couch.

My dad found the stinky nest and completely cleaned it out. Here’s what’s really bizarre: Our cats (useless in this situation, of course) had little toy mice they played with. There were a dozen or so of these small mice arranged around the center of the nest! :eek: Like the mouse had disciples or something.

Dad finally caught the mice in a glue trap and WARNING: Graphic mouse death ahead had to kill it by putting it in a plastic bag and thwunking it on the kitchen counter a few times until it stopped moving. If that’s not your cup of tea, maybe glue traps should be avoided.

20

I had a mouse in my apartment about a week ago. I was sitting on the pc and I see my cat dashing around and batting at something. I thought it was a bottle cap or one of his toys and didn’t think much about it. A few minutes later, he comes strutting past me obviously looking very happy with a tail sticking out of his mouth. Blech. I go to the kitchen to get the broom and dustpan as he settles on the throw with his mouse. I go up to him “drop it please kitty” and he does obediently looking very happy. I scoop it up as fast as I can (it is very dead but not dismembered or bloody) and flush it down the toilet. :slight_smile: I pet him and tell him he was a very good kitty. I never knew that he would be a mouser much less ever kill a mouse. I just hope a rat doesn’t ever get in since a rat would likely be nearly as big as my cat.