The mouse story

Hello all! Well things are starting to calm down around here a little bit, I’m done with the TV segments I told you about next week and the house is quiet for the first time in almost two weeks – no one working here but me today. Ahhh…so nice. :)

Awhile ago I promised a follow up on our issues with some tiny little friends foes…the mice problem we had last fall. Honestly? It’s taken me this long to be up to the task of writing about the whole fiasco.

So here’s the thing – we got some clues as to what was going on in our ceilings (ewwww) but I ignored them, just not realizing. We had never had mice before, so this was new to me. Well, we had one little guy who used to live in our garage, and I swear it was just him. We only saw him a couple times and knew where he was living in there (because he destroyed ALL of my garden gloves making a bed).

We removed the storage container he was living in and never saw him again. That was years ago – fast forward to late summer of last year. I’m getting my oil changed and the guys come in with my air filter and I am all ready to say, sure, yeah, I know, I don’t want a new one….you know how that goes. ;)

But this guy has a funny look on his face and he tells me that a mouse has been living in my air filter. In my CAR. He showed me the filter, with a perfect little imprint for the mouse’s bed, and the little fluffs of stuff he had brought in there to make it even more comfy. (I would think the filter was comfy enough, but this is a mouse…I now realize how resourceful they are.) He also showed me all the bird food in the container he had stored up to eat.

IN MY CAR. Under my hood. I couldn’t believe it.

I went home and it was then that I realized a HUGE bag of bird seed we had in the garage has been busted open and was spilling out everywhere – courtesy of the mouse (mice):

Even after that, I still didn’t think much of it. I figured the mouse’s bed was replaced, so he would take off to a new house. Car? Fast forward a month or so, and late one night I’m laying in bed and I hear this tiny little sound up in the ceiling. It went on for a few seconds, and I thought it was odd for sure. I wondered if we had a squirrel or something and made a mental note to investigate more.

Well, it was fall (busiest time of year around here) and my sis was getting married, so it just slipped my mind because I didn’t hear it again. A few weeks later, I’m in the bathroom and I hear it again, this time louder and longer.

And then I was starting to freak. Something LIVE was in our ceiling. I still wasn’t thinking mice though.

And then one day just after that sound, while I was in the storage room in our basement, a mouse ran right past my face on one of the shelves. I did what any self respecting woman would do – I screamed, jumped up and down wringing my hands and ran to my husband. He was all…uhhh, it’s just a mouse.

JUST A MOUSE. He said that.

The next day we picked up some traps (the kind that keep them alive) and put them in the room, and the bugger (I’m still thinking it’s ONE mouse – stop laughing at me) tripped two of them and finally got caught in one. We took him outside and let him go and kind of laughed about it -- oh, wasn’t that funny how you freaked out Sarah, we had a little mouse. So funny.

I was a mouse virgin people – those of you who have had them are laughing at me right now cause you know. Next night…kid you NOT, I walk in the room again, and a mouse runs right by my face AGAIN.

This time, the freak out was a little more dramatic because I’m thinking we have a super sonic smart mouse who refuses to leave our house. I was so naive. Turns out we had TONS OF THEM. And yes, they are super sonic smart.

We found out a day or two later when the professionals came out how bad it was. I’m not sure how many we had, but they had been living in our attic for who knows how long. They had burrowed tunnels in insulation and pooed everywhere and traveled through walls and between floors.

I was starting to get smart now (it only took a few months) and realized how I had been practically inviting them into our home. First with the bird seed spilling out in the garage, and then I took a closer look at the storage room to try to determine why they liked it so much. I found the culprit:

Decorative sticks. They had practically worn a path on one of the shelves to get to them. You can see in that picture that the little pods were missing on most of the sticks. I had been feeding the mice in more ways than one.

I found other decorative items they had been nibbling on too. Then one day I went to grab something from the junk drawer in our island and realized they had been helping themselves to candy, gum and random plastic objects in there.

Talk about freaking out. They were coming up through the floor, through a small electrical hole in the bottom of the island, and eating absolutely everything in their path.

It was disgusting. This whole experience was probably the most disgusting I’ve ever dealt with. Mice are highly destructive and will eat anything. They ate half of a plastic iPod case we had in that junk drawer.

By now the pest control had set out the stuff to get rid of them (yes, we had to resort to that, no I didn’t want to, yes, it was the only option) but it was going to take two weeks. In that two weeks I tried starting to clean up the storage room but gave up – I could tell they were still coming back, even though I had removed the food.

The mess they left behind was…well, let’s just say overwhelming. And expensive. I threw away so much stuff it made me sick. Baskets, decorative items, paper goods…and it wasn’t that I was upset about losing the stuff, it was “money” I was putting into those trash bags.

Finally I gave up and had to just stop trying to get the storage room back in order. I honestly couldn’t handle it anymore. Just this week I’ve started to tackle it again – three months later. It’s overwhelming because they must have been everywhere in there – I have to take each item off the shelves and clean/sanitize or toss each one. And I have a LOT of stuff in there.

This is when the storage room was nice and organized and clean…when the mice hit it wasn’t, which makes clean up even harder:

The stuff in bins or baskets is the hardest. I wiped down a basket full of light bulbs last night – it’s at that point that you wonder if you should really clean each item or just toss it all? I’ll spare you the details, but I find all kinds of surprises as I’m going through it all.

Like I said, it is overwhelming and not something I would wish on anyone. I know in the scheme of life it’s just a blip and it’s not that big of a deal, but I’ll be cleaning up the messes they left for at least another few weeks.

So here’s what I’ve learned – first of all, if you see one, there’s usually more. Most of the time there’s more. You just won’t hear or see them until there are so many they start coming into your living areas (a few weeks after this happened a friend texted me needing the number of the guy we used because they just found a mouse climbing their drapes!!).

They are stealth little creatures – they can climb almost anything, right up the side of your house on brick or vinyl. They fit into the tiniest of holes – every house will have holes they can get into. It just depends on if you invite them in like I did. (Doh.) The guy we used said at one time he tried to start up a business where he promised to make houses “mouse proof” – he gave up on the business a few months in because he said it’s nearly impossible. Perfectly well built houses have tiny spots they can get in – in both the roof area and at the foundation.

Mice can swim, climb, jump – we heard a story how someone caught a mouse, took it past a creek on their property and let it go. The man watched the mouse hop into the creek, swim across and head right back for their house. Who knows if it’s true but after experiencing them I don’t have a doubt in my mind!

So we’ve learned a lot through the whole deal – I’m buying a large plastic (OK, I guess metal – good point!) container for all the bird seed. We had the ceiling of the storage room drywalled and anything decorative that could be edible at all (think the decorative balls/sticks so many of us use) is sealed up in bags or containers.

And no, the fact that I put mice on my stairs every year at Halloween is not lost on me:

We did put them up last fall, before all this hit. I had to take them down – but they will be back next year…I think. ;)

Underground family room

Well thank you for the lovely comments about our sweet, sweet kitty. You all always make me feel like I have a few hundred extra friends around the world. :)

This post is about a space I’m kind of obsessed with –- the basement. I freakin’ LOVE basements. Something about them – they are just super cool spaces to me. I may have mentioned one or 800 times how excited I am about finishing ours…someday. It’s been eight years of saying “It’s going to happen this year!” and it never happens.

It’s certainly the biggest project we’ll ever do to this house. At first I thought it would be fairly straightforward – frame it up, add a few extra outlets, put up some walls and be done. Easy peasy – pushaw.

As we’ve used the space more over the years, we realize more and more that we’d like to do. (Read: stuff that costs more money.) Like is the key word. If they will happen or not, I have no idea.

Our basement is obviously still unfinished, but as I've mentioned before, we USE it. It’s just too much extra space not to! And although it’s not particularly pretty to look at, I love seeing seldom seen areas in other bloggers’ homes, so I like to share how we use this one. And how we see it working in the future.

I guess I’m saying, you probably won’t be pinning any of these photos. :) But I like to show how we use this typically unusable space.

The layout in our “family room” down there has changed more than any other rooms in our house put together. Because of our very open floor plan, I don’t move furniture around in our rooms…like, ever. They’re set up the way they work. And stay that way. Forever.

So the basement is my fix for when I want to change something up. ;)

Over Christmas break, we made a few changes to the basement family room space to make it even more usable:

This space used to be set up like this:

But we had a whole lotta shifting of furniture that happened when we got our new family room sectional. The old sofa went upstairs to the loft and the two recliners that were there came down here.

We got those recliners about six years ago, and I don’t care for the look of them anymore, but oh man, they are SO COMFY. Dang.

I’ve found three keys to making an unfinished space comfy – warmth (blankets and a space heater if needed), something soft for the tush (loveseat and recliners) and keeping the feet warm (lots and lots of rugs).

Oh, and no spiders. Spiders kind of ruin everything.

(Side note – I once had a serviceman tell me ours was the cleanest unfinished basement he’s ever seen. He couldn’t even find a spider web. I don’t know why we don’t get bugs down here, but we just don’t. Knock. on. wood.)

The TV cabinet is the old one from our family room, the side tables we’ve had for years and the Pottery Barn coffee table was a Craigslist find early last year. It was supposed to go upstairs but it didn’t work. 

The rugs are mostly the really cheapy utility rugs you can find at most hardware stores. We also have a huge one down there that was a remnant and I got it for a steal.

Now that it’s so warm and cozy down there, we find ourselves using this space ALL the time. We don’t really need an extra family room, but it’s there and we want to use it. Eventually it will be a movie room/family room space, and who says you need to have drywall to make it that way?

Not us!

I have a confession…every single night of Christmas break (two weeks people!), we sat our butts on these chairs and had movie nights:

The dog and the Bub usually cuddle up with one of us, or lay on the couch.

It was/is SO FUN.

Nothing matches, nothing is prettied up, but it has been one of our very favorite spots over the past few weeks. Isn’t that crazy?

I like to call it industrial chic:

Ha! That’s totally in, right? ;)

Although we like the way it’s set up now, it’s going to change, AGAIN.

I’ve been doing my workouts down here, (I put sliders on the bottom of the coffee table so I can move it easily – that thing is heavy!) and I keep banging into the chairs and table:

And when we DO finish the basement, we envision an electric fireplace in that alcove where the TV is. (I envision it built into that space so it looks like it’s always been there.)

So the room needs to be oriented the other way, facing the long wall.

That got my wheels turning. Because we are closer than we’ve ever been to actually moving forward with the framing, I want to set up the basement like we want it when it’s finished.

That means my craft space behind those chairs:

Will need to be moved to the back corner by our storage space, where the Bub’s toys are:

And his toys will go into that corner where my stuff currently resides. Got it? :)

My craft area really houses more than just that – it’s all the wrapping supplies, home decor stuff I can’t let go of, extra pantry items and all the seasonal serving dishes and baking stuff.

It will be great because the kiddo has WAY less toys than I do. ;) So there will be a lot less STUFF as soon as you walk down the stairs. My craft room will eventually be part of the storage/work out/laundry room.

That room will have to serve a TON of functions so I want to move everything around to see if my ideas will even work.

I put a little digital layout a few months ago, while daydreaming. :) Even though we haven’t started the work yet, I bide my time by planning. And planning. It helps me hold my horses and it’s something that needs to be done anyway.

Here’s an idea of the way I hope to make it work:

Just as a side note, this is the only part of our home you’ll see a floor plan for. :) I don’t feel comfortable sharing the layout for the other parts of the house, just for security reasons. (Crazy maybe, but I’d rather be crazier than the crazies. You know what I’m sayin’?)

But I know you’ll all be coming along for this ride with us, so this part I will share, because it’s below ground level. :)

Anyhoo, in this layout I still have my craft table off to the side of the family room space, and I now know I don’t want it there. So that space where the blue rug is will get smaller, as that wall will need to come out even further. I was trying to avoid that, but I want to be able to shut the door on all that STUFF.

And you eagle eyes will see where I’m planning on putting the washer and dryer. That’s a whole other post. (Yes, I’ve already done a ton of planning and thinking about that and it’s going to happen if I have anything to do with it. And I do.) ;)

So…there’s our underground family room in all it’s glory. And the start of the beginning of the initial kind of maybe finishing our basement. It has to start somewhere, right?

Do you love moving furniture around? Does you house let you? ;) Do you use floor plans for spaces like me, or do you get a work out and shove everything around till it works? Do you love basements like I do? And most importantly, are you as PYSCHED as I am for it to (maybe?) start soon??

Wahooo!

(And do not hold me to this, I may be saying this exact same thing next year.)