Quintuplets

It's been a long time since I've written about mice, mostly because the mice have been absent. This isn't to say that we haven't had other animals to deal with. This spring and summer we had problems with squirrels and a bat. These days, we just take these visitors in stride.

One night in September, my wife woke me up at three o'clock in the morning to tell me that I'd best put out the traps. And sure enough, I heard the sounds of a rodent party in the attic above our head. What followed was a bit out of the ordinary. The first night we caught one mouse - fairly normal. The second night we caught two more. And then the fun started.

Over the next six hours, five baby mice found their way out of the attic and proceeded to wander around, presumably looking for mom and dad. It's one thing to set a trap and let "the machine" do the work. It's another to be the actual executioner. Isn't this one of the reasons why the French invented the guillotine? So we carefully caught each one, showed it to the girls and took it out to a timber pile and let it go. I hope they have a long happy life, far away from our house.

So that means since we took possession of our house on August 30, 2007, we have caught 63 mice. What always puzzles me though, is why we never catch them in the basement and why we never see them in the living quarters of the house. They only seem to live in the attic. That's a long way up for a little mouse.

Skeeters

Dear mosquitoes,

In case you’ve forgotten the rules, I’ll lay them out for you.

• You do not like the sun. If I am in the sunshine, you are supposed to leave me alone.
  
• You live in woods, tall grass and in shade (see point one above).
  
• You do not live on shortly mowed lawns, driveways or any other hardscape.
  
• A light breeze is enough to keep you from landing on me and feeding.
  
• Regardless of location, the hours between 9:00 pm and 11:00 pm are all yours. Anyone stupid enough to be outside during these times is fair game. They go outside at their own risk.
  
• If it is not between 9:00 pm and 11:00 pm or if I am not in the woods, tall grass or shade, then you are not supposed to be feeding on me.
  

Failure to abide by these rules will result in something drastic on my part.

Thank you.

Camponotus Pennsylvanicus

Last week I woke up, got dressed, went downstairs, opened the cupboard for breakfast and saw something really, really fast, small and black running around. At first I thought it was a small centipede, but as I moved things around to find it, I realized it was an ant, and another, and another, and another.

Usually I don't get too worried about ants. Remove the food, put out some poison, wait a few weeks and they die. But these were carpenter ants. Besides that fact that they are big for ants and offer a higher level of creep factor, they also make their homes in wood. We have a house made of structural terra cotta, faced with brick, but obviously everything inside the house is made of wood - the joists, the floors, the walls, the ceilings, etc. I have no idea how entrenched they are in the house or how much damage they have done. Considering that we've never seen them before, we're hoping that this is the first year they've invaded and that it is related to the record levels of rainfall we've received.

So, we removed the food, put out some poison and now we're waiting a few weeks. I'm also kicking myself because this year, unlike past years, I didn't get around to putting down a good layer of diatomaceous earth around the house. That certainly would have helped.

We also went shopping for blinds for the windows, and I was more than a little surprised at how much money one could spend on blinds. I had once heard that the cost of drapes shouldn't exceed more than 10% of the value of the house. I scoffed at that as ridiculous. I can see now how it would be quite easy to exceed that for those disinclined to frugality.

Catch Up

Ms. Huis mentioned recently about pulling the trigger here.

It always amazes me how fast things can move when you get professionals to do the work, especially when there are no dependencies between contractors. Up until noon yesterday, I had no idea when our guest room plaster was going to be prepared and ready for painting. Now it looks like it will be done by the end of the week. Getting the guest room done was always higher on Ms. Huis list of things to do than mine, but it definitely needs to be done before winter. Thin as it is, plaster and lathe does offer some insulation against the cold. Gaping one foot by three foot holes in the plaster would have made the guest room unpleasantly cold.

And as long as they are there, we're having them repair the dining room ceiling too. It will be nice to see some non-structural improvements in the house. We've been in the house almost three years now and I'm anxious to start seeing some cosmetic improvements in the house. New gutters, sewers and electrical are great, but they are the kinds of things you take for granted. I don't go into the basement and gaze admiringly at the new breaker box or stare in rapt adoration at the new plastic sewer pipe. But new paint or light fixtures or a refinished floor? Those are the things a person notices.

We're still waiting on a quote for the repairs to the front entry. Our contractor says we'll get it next week. We'll see. He's relying on other contractors for quotes (see my comment above about time lines and dependencies on other contractors). We're also waiting on the quote for the front door. Ironically, when I went back to the Woodcraft store to find router bits, who should I find working there but the furniture refinishing guy. Clearly I'm not giving him enough business. I expect his quote soon.

I've toyed around with making my own beadboard for awhile now. The old stuff is not the same dimensions as the new stuff that you can find around here. For a long time I didn't know how, what the cost was or how much work it would be. After poking around at Woodcraft, I see now that all I need is a router table and $75 in router bits. That just leaves the time involved. The irony of lack of time is never lost on me. If I didn't have to work, I'd have enough time to finish all of these projects. Of course if I didn't work, I wouldn't have any money for all of these projects.

We had a bat in the house again last week. This one was very obliging though. It flew (or fell) into a large tote of blocks in the kids' play room. Ms. Huis heard it and woke me up. I tried to go back to sleep, but her insistence finally got me out of bed. I picked up the tote of blocks, set it outside and went back to bed. She stayed and watched it crawl out and fly away. I never saw a thing. I bet she imagined the whole thing.

I've had mouse traps set out now for several months and caught nothing. Either we're over our mouse invasion, or we've used natural selection with our house mice to remove a predilection for peanut butter.

Smell That Squirellosaurus

My wife reminded me in one of her comments that just before (potentially) shutting in the squirrel, I had an exchange with my youngest daughter that went something like this.

"Come on honey. Let's go pound on the porch and see if we can scare that squirrel out of the roof."

"OK!"

"I hope he comes running out this time."

"Why?"

"Well, if I close up the hole before he gets out, he'll die in there and stink."

"Yeah. Just like the dinosaurs."

"That's right. He'll go extinct."

Shifting Priorities

After this weekend, I'm happy to report that there is one less squirrel hole in the house. I hope there is one less squirrel as well, but I'm not sure. I guess if I'm wrong, we'll find out based on the smell.

I know I scared at least two squirrels away before I started repairs, but the third one found it amusing to peek at me through the holes in a junction box while I was repairing the soffit box. I got him back though. I reached through the hole with a needle nose pliers and pulled out some of his hair.

Hopefully he got the hint and left some time over the last four or five days before I shut him in.

I was hoping to put off roofing the back porch for awhile yet, but while repairing the soffit, the amount of rot in the corners became apparent. It doesn't look good. I guess we'll get a bid for the back porch too when we get our bid for the front entry. I hoped we'd have that bid already, but our contractor tore his bicep a few weeks ago and has been out of commission.

Evicted. Homeless. Eaten?

One of the people I went to college with recently described blogs and twitter as "narcissistic banter." If anything, I'd say he's being generous. I'd call it narcissistic drivel. It's one of the reasons why I waffled for a very long time about blogging. What could I possibly say that would be so important or interesting that someone would want to read it? I thought that the initial experiences with the house would provide sufficient humor or interest, but now that we've been in it as long as we have, more and more it feels like the House of 42 Doors is turning into a giant to do list, with some items checked off and others not (see last week's blog to see what I mean).

While I struggle more and more frequently defining topics of interest, I do find a great deal of value with the blog as a historical document. When did the kitchen flood? How old was Pumpkin when she played in the cabog? How many mice have we caught? Does this make the content narcissistic? I suppose so, but so long as I find value in the content, perhaps I can avoid the appellation of drivel.

We've been having problems with a squirrel in the soffit of our back porch. The fix is easy enough - cover up the holes, but in the never ending list of things to do on the house, those holes were never high enough on the priority list. They are now.

Last night I saw said squirrel hanging upside down on the soffit, with its head poking out of the hole. I was able to scare it away and thought that was the end of it, until I heard ANOTHER scritch scritch in the soffit. More thumping on my part caused another squirrel to fall out, only much smaller. My immediate thought was, "Crap. She's got kids." Junior ran around on the ground before he finally found his way to the giant oak tree in our backyard and climbed to the first limb. He sat there yipping and crying for mom.

It turns out that the distress calls of a young squirrel also happen to attract red tail hawks, which we happen to have nesting in a pine tree not more than 100 feet from our house. I spent the next 15 minutes or so watching mother squirrel trying to corral her baby to safety while a red tail hawk sat in branches just above, waiting for its chance to snatch junior. The squirrels chattered and the hawk screeched, knowing it unnerved junior.

I didn't see the end but here's hoping that this is the end of the squirrels in the soffit. I'll pick hawks over poison any day. Regardless, I guess I need to board up the holes this weekend.

Stripping

I'm done stripping. The hours are long, it ruins my clothes, it makes a huge mess, the smell gives me a headache and I can pay somebody else to do it for me. I am of course talking about paint stripping.

Yesterday I picked up the trim from the paint stripping place. They are in the middle of moving their business, so things are a bit chaotic for them right now. In talking to the owner, the current economic crisis has also hit the commercial real estate market. For those businesses that are still solvent, there are opportunites to relocate to bigger or better locations. They've moved from the middle of nowhere, sandwiched between a roofing company warehouse and a scrap metal business, to one of those locations off of a major highway that you can see, but you'll never be able to figure out how to get to. Thank goodness for online mapping.

The shop is a mess at the moment and just walking in gives me a headache from the fumes. It's a very good reminder of why I don't want to work on stripping the wood in the first place. Originally they weren't planning on getting my pieces done for another two weeks, but a few of the pieces of trim are 14 feet long, and they were getting tired of tripping over them in the chaos of the move. The shop has all kinds of beautiful pieces of furniture in various states of repair and refinishing there. We have a broken, vintage Morris-style chair that came with the house that needs repair and refinishing (looks like this). It may end up going to these guys.

So now that the window trim is back, it still needs staining, varnishing and then adding back to the window frame. And of course I need to put back the window I took out in the first place, replace the ropes with chains and add brass weather stripping. It sounds like a lot more work than it is, I hope. I'd post pictures, but several weeks back our digital camera met the ground a tad bit forcefully (dropping will do that) and now it's being repaired.

We weathered through Halloween just fine. We decorated the house a little more than last year and we were again asked about the ghost in the attic. My wife had a prime opportunity to perpetuate the myth, but missed it. She had been putting a strobe light in the attic on some nights to create a "spooky" light in the attic. When one of the neighbors commented that it looked creepy, the wife said thanks. I would have looked at them and told them, "What light? What are you talking about?" Ah well. Maybe next year.

We also caught mouse 55. So Great Stuff foam and I have been busy filling anything that even looks like a hole in the basement. I found several that I had missed last year, including two holes, one inch in diameter left over from when we upgraded our electrical service in 2007. From a mouse's perspective, all that was missing was a porch light and a little mat that said WELCOME!

Haunted Woods

When our house changed hands in the late 70's, the family knocked down the old greenhouses to the north and partitioned the several acres of land into lots. A cul-de-sac was put in and houses built on those lots. They intentionally made the lots large, some almost an acre in size. Some of those lots have been partitioned again, but two houses on cul-de-sac still have large lot sizes. One is .44 acres and the other is .87 acres. Both lots are heavily wooded and they have no backyard neighbors. The land behind them is owned by the factory and is used as a maintenance road. It is essentially junk industrial land that no one uses. It's unfortunate as it runs alongside the river and could have been prime residential land instead of worthless, unused industrial land.

For the last 12 years these two families have hosted Haunted Woods on their land. Every two years the venue changes from one back yard to the other. This gives time for the woods to recover from the abuse they receive. The families create a maze-like path in the woods and decorate it with a seemingly limitless supply of cobwebs, animated spooks and props. They have landmarks like the "Wall of Severed Heads" and the "Tunnel of Terror." There are three tours that they offer. The first is early in the evening, while it is still light out and there are no live spooks. The second has spooks, but if the tour guide has a red light, the live spooks are put to sleep. The third is the full on, no holds barred, live spooks tour. The live spooks are mostly neighborhood kids dressed up in costumes who jump out you and try to scare you into wetting yourself.

The families have a suggested donation of $1 a kid and $2 per adult. They take any profit from the event and donate it to a local charity. It runs every weekend in October and then for a few days leading up to Halloween.

We took the girls to the no spooks tour one evening before supper and Ms. Huis and I went on the full tour a few nights later. It's amazing how jumpy we were even knowing that we were safe. It's a great neighborhood activity that helps pull everyone together. We haven't had much to do with it yet, but I can see that changing as the girls get older.

Oh, and for the record Mouse, LIV.

Mouse LIII

Mouse 52. Yawn. Yawn. I was becoming immune to the horror of it all - the intermittent but ongoing maiming and killing of rodentia. Then came mouse number 53. He was small and gray with big black eyes, rounded ears and a sad little twitchy nose. I met him last weekend when he tried to "hide" by my foot in the basement. He ran away before I could catch him. And he was very cute.

Monday night I found him on the basement floor, near death. We don't put out poison, so I can only surmise that his impending demise was the result of disease or insufficient food supplies. I picked him up with a gloved hand. He breathed out a labored breath and tried to arch his back. I carried him up to show the girls and then took him outside near the compost heap. If he has enough energy to forage for food, he won't need to forage far. I don't think he's going to make it though, poor thing.

Sometime ago one of the ropes broke in a double hung window of our dining room. I took both the upper and lower sashes out (quite honestly, I think just to see if I could). But so long as they are out...

One of the things that really bothers me is the painted woodwork in our dining room. The original owners were very careful about how they choose the flooring for their house. The used oak flooring in the public spaces of the house (the entryway, the living room, and the dining rooms) and "cheap" yellow birch flooring everywhere else. The trim and woodwork in the entryway and the living room are stained oak. The trim and woodwork in the dining room though is painted white. It doesn't match. I have always wanted to strip the paint off the woodwork in the dining room and stain it to match the oak floors and the entryway/living room woodwork. It's funny how one small cotton rope breaking was all that I needed to convince myself (and my wife) that the windows needed a complete overhaul, including the window trim.

The problem is that having windows disassembled in winter leaves a gaping hole. Even in our case, where I have the storms on, a single pane of glass isn't nearly as good as two, which means the race is on to get the window put back together, along with the all of the trim I pulled off. In the interest of getting the job down quickly, I took all the window trim (about 100 linear feet of it) to a local paint stripping place. If people have any experience with prices, please let me know. This place charges $1.80 per linear foot for any piece that is 6" or less in width. And another $2.20 on top of that to finish. That was a little more than I was expecting.

The upshot is that in three or four weeks, I should have the window trim ready to be stained and varnished.

Mouse LI

September? What September? Where did it go? I find myself reeling at the month that never was. Suddenly we're in the middle of fall with Halloween looming and I'm not sure if I traveled forward in time or if I've suddenly awoken from a fugue.

Stepping back and looking at the House of 42 Doors, there are plenty of things going on, but in the interest of having something to write about in October, I'll limit each of my postings, rather than do one catch up post.

Fall means colder weather, a plethora of food and a search for shelter by our wee friends, the mice. I've set the traps in the attic again, and in the space of a week, we've caught two more, equaling a grand total of 51 mice since we bought the house two years ago. I knew we had at least one in the house. In the evenings, I could hear her sliding down the interior walls of the bathroom.

I had hoped that when we had the house tuckpointed, it would have solved our mouse problem. I guess that they are still finding a way in. We continue to fill in cracks where we see them. I know for a fact that plugging a hole in the kitchen has kept them out of our living space. Now they live solely in the walls and in the attic, which is an improvement.

The family has been pushing to get a cat for the last few months and I am hesitant for a variety of reasons that are not the topic of this post. I am wondering though if having a cat in the house would actually help with the mice. Not so much from catching the mice, but more from any scent that the cat would emit. Does anyone know of any evidence that cat phermones drive away mice?

You'd Be A Lot More Welcome...

If you'd come with your own bat cave, batsuit and batmobile.

We left the window open for you. Glad you were able to see yourself out.

Beetastic

Just bee-tastic.

Last Wednesday I was raking up the dead leaves and the dead weeds. The dead weeds have been the only silver lining in our cloud and rain free summer to date. There was one stubborn thistle that needed pulling, so I reached down and gave it a good tug. What I didn't see in the evening twilight was the large hive of underground bees buzzing around. My efforts gained me one large thistle and one large bee sting. I'd been stung once before, when I was around 10, so I didn't get too concerned about allergies, but it still really hurt.

Saturday the buckthorn infested city land behind ours had a box elder come down. We helped another neighbor finish disposing of it. And what did I put the same bee stung hand into while moving some lumber? ANOTHER nest of ground bees. I got two pokes in the hand that time around.

I guess the dry weather is making the bees cranky too.

Thump! Supper's ready!

Summer is here and our first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share has arrived. We also opted to put in a relatively small garden this year, so depending on how much we end up feeding the bunnies, we may have an overabundance of a few things when combined with the CSA produce. We very much enjoy our CSA and I encourage you to look into it if you aren't already a member of a CSA.

On the rodent front, we've seen no mice in weeks, but the rabbits are eating our garden and a few of our hostas. This weekend we may try the old box, stick and string trick to see if we can catch one and relocate it elsewhere. If it works, the kids will talk about it for months. If it doesn't, they'll talk about it for days or weeks. Either way, I think it's worth trying.

A little known fact (to me) about bricks with recessed mortar is that they are laughably easy for squirrels to climb. Tuesday after work I found two squirrels busily chasing each other around the outside of my house. It appears love is in the air.

My wife succeeded in scaring one by opening a second story window, leaning out and yelling at it. [MHH says - Actually, it was the bathroom window that opens onto the second floor balcony. So I climbed out and yelled at him!] It took a 12 foot jump to the ground and ran off. The other one had the temerity to hang from the corner of my house and scold me for evidently getting too close to his home. I asked him for rent, but he just twitched his tail at me. Cheeky.

Wednesday morning, as I was brushing my teeth and looking out the bathroom window, who should look around the corner and peek at me through the window? You guessed it, my freeloading renter. I didn't have time to deal with him, so I let him have free rein for the day. That night though, I chased him off again, and there was another fabulous twelve foot free fall. There's something very satisfying about hearing the thump of a squirrel on the ground. Maybe it's an ancestral memory of the days when we were hunter gatherers and that thump meant supper had fallen from the tree. In any case, I haven't seen him since then.

I am of course concerned about the squirrels and the numerous holes in my soffit. I've seen no evidence that they are nesting in my soffit, but seeing them makes the soffit repair a bit more urgent. I'll have to get something over those holes this weekend, beadboard or no.

Invaded

I feel so...invaded.

The house originally belonged to a family that owned a greenhouse business adjacent to it. The greenhouses are long since gone and the previous owner (an architect) clearly did not inherit any sense of gardening from his progenitors.

When we purchased it, the property was seriously overgrown. We have buckthorn, tartarian honeysuckle, creeping charlie, burdock and garlic mustard. There are other plants on the property that I haven't identified yet, but I have a sinking feeling that they are also listed as invasive species. America is a melting pot, but I'm not sure that should apply to plants as well.

The soffit work continues, albeit slowly. Our youngest has been sick most of the week, and still is not fully healthy. This has taken away a fair share of my working time. But at this point, I can stand in the attic and look down through the floor, through the soffit and see the outside. I'm hoping to use the new Rotozip to finish cutting out the rotten bead board and get the south soffit sealed up this weekend.

There is some concern that so long as the soffit is open, we are subject to all manner of animal invaders too - bats, birds and wasps. Yesterday Ms. Huis called me to say there was a bat crawling up the side of the house in the middle of the day. And I know that one of the sizable holes in the soffit has had a lot of wasp activity. Last year's wasp nest in the soffit ended up being about several cubic feet in size, and I don't want a repeat of that. We came across the under-the-floor nest this spring, when my dad and I put in the cross pieces to try and stop drafts from entering the house under the attic floor. Thankfully, it was empty and a darn cool thing to show our eldest to teach her about wasp nests and the six sided shape of their cells.

We've also caught two more mice in the last few weeks, bringing the count up to 52. Here's hoping all the Americans out there have a safe and happy Memorial Day.