Mice *$&%^#%$

Well, we went 13 years until we had mouse issues in the house. Last year they decided to make our home, their home. We responded by killing them, each and every one of them.

This year we thought we were free of them, no signs of them in the kitchen where the dog and cat eat, great right? Well, the upstairs spare bathroom I swear I’ll complete by next Spring has mouse poop on every square inch of the floor, suddenly like.. still, nothing anywhere else… how does that make any sense? A bathroom with nothing in it but bare walls and a bare floor, really?

Yes, apparently this is a room for them… no food, no warmth nothing for them yet, here they are. Turns out they are in the garage as well, little bastards. So, I went out today and bought the electronic sonic repellers that seemed to work perfectly in the RV. I installed one in the garage and also put down a modified trap, you know the kind, the ones with the huge yellow plastic pad that feeds the mice but doesn’t trap them. They were useless in the previous RV.

I cut away all of the plastic because I found these things are useless in the house as well. They look like the old fashioned mouse traps but lack the metal end piece instead they have this huge plastic pile of crap attached which seems to feed the mice instead of trapping them.

This victor trap is similar in that it has the old fashioned base with the yellow plastic bait holder, just as useless as the ones I bought today.

 

Here is a Victor trap that is the old fashioned kind, simply put some peanut butter on the metal piece and the mouse will be caught in no time. BUT NO, they always think they can improve on the design so they now sell the design above. The old fashioned kind are always sold out, but there are always plenty of the kind with the cheap yellow plastic trap, I wonder why… yeah…

So, what to do? I trimmed all the yellow plastic I could off of the new traps and made them as similar to the old ones as possible. Why you ask? Because if you use the new fangled traps as they are sold the mice eat the peanut butter clean off and leave you a clean trap, no mouse caught.

Anyway, I trimmed all of the extra plastic off because the last time I used these trap they fed the mice, they didn’t catch any. So with the plastic trimmed off and now laced with peanut butter they work like the old fashioned traps, every time!

I plugged in the large sonic repeller and put down one trap on the garage steps to see which would win out. Either the mouse would be repelled and leave the trap or it would go for it. It went for it, dead mouse, not sure what that proves. Now I wonder if the electronic repellers works or not, is it too small for the garage? Since we had no mice from the day we used them in the new RV I believed they worked, yet, here the mouse clearly ignored it and got caught. Maybe the garage is too big for the electronic repeller we bought but is fine for the smaller space of the RV, I don’t know.

The modified traps don’t like to latch but after an hour of modifying them I have 6 of them put into the garage and bare walled bathroom. We’ll see what happens, so far I have caught 2 of the damned things. I am willing to bet all traps will be filled tomorrow. I am going to put traps down until no more are caught. I think the fields that are being replaced with roads nearby are driving the mice to our neighborhood so this will be a battle all winter long.

Either way, none will survive in this house, no friggin way….