Day 253
With my mind firmly focused on the upcoming Halloweesn season, I am reminded of scary things we deal with every day. Many people fear snakes. We purposely put out snake boards to catch them. Many other fear storms. We eagerly anticipate watching a thunderstorm roll in through our backyard. Many people hate the dark. We love heading outside on a near pitch black night to view the start, hear the owls, and catch the fireflies.
There is one fear that many people have that we find annoying. Especially when we thought we had already done what we needed to do to eliminate them.
Mice.
Now I will admit that while I am not particularly scared of mice, I am definitely not happy when I see them where I don't want them to be. When we first discovered we had a rodent issue, we felt some relief when we realized our young cats were excellent mousers. Still, we didn’t want to rely on our purring predators to be the mice gatekeepers and felt we could take some steps to better deter mice from breaching our basement.
We paid a professional company to come help us reach this goal. Though nothing is completely guaranteed, the thorough inspection combined with ample steel wool and foam insulation installation made us much more confident the mice entry would be greatly hindered.
The problem continued, though it was a smaller problem and our cats seemed annoyed there were less treats crawling around.
The company came back and did some more work. Because of our floating deck, we had to remove boards so that areas previously inaccessible were worked on to upgrade their mouse proofing. Surely this would slow down our problem.
It did. But not for long.
While our cats were happy to enjoy more furry treats, we were not. The company returned a third time for an even more thorough inspection to find any potential entry point, no matter how small. We found a few tiny possibilities and learned just how persistent mice can be. Even though we didn't have to pay for any work done after their first visit, we hope we don’t see the company or mice again.
