Rodents

It would seem that mice like nice warm houses as much as we do. Go figure.

It would seem we are a trifle over-run. (Apologies to all those who have already heard me go on at length about our mouse issue - there's nothing new here, but I still have a need to get it off my chest!)

I knew we had a small mouse problem - the odd dropping here and there, the occasional full trap, that sort of thing. I figured this level of rodentry was acceptable, given that we have active compost heaps, chicken food, and a lots of hiding spaces in the garden. And no cats or dogs. Some mouse encroachment was inevitable, I figured, so long as it didn't get out of hand! About a month ago I made sure all the food was in mouse-proof containers, found one open box of cornmeal that was well-moused (which I got rid of), and figured that would keep their numbers down, or at least, easily managed by the one trap in the kitchen.

How wrong I was.

Our living area is semi-open plan. There are double french-type doors between the living room and the dining room, and an open doorway from the dining room to the kitchen. The french doors are usually kept open, except in really cold weather when we shut them to keep the heat (from the heatpump) in the living room - usually in the evenings and overnight. Yesterday these doors were closed pretty much all day as I and the girls kept the living room toasty warm. They stayed shut overnight too.

I have once seen a mouse run from the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room and along the living room wall behind the sofa. I have no idea where it went after that - I couldn't find it. I didn't think much of it (except to go re-load the trap) - just "gosh the mice are getting brazen, time to step up the trapping". It never occurred to me that I had just seen a mouse using one of their super-highways.

This morning while sitting in the dining room with my morning coffee I noticed a large amount of carpet-fluff in the doorway to the living room. "That's odd," I thought, and went closer to inspect. Mixed in with the fluff was a considerable amount of mouse droppings. And on closer inspection I found that the little blighters have chewed the carpet bare along where the french doors close - apparently in an attempt to dig through and re-open their super-highway. I then noticed a similar, but much smaller, bare patch with associated carpet fluff at the other door out of the living room.

"How big is my mouse problem?!" I muttered to myself, and stalked through to the kitchen to investigate. One clean and empty trap. The mice have (once more) successfully removed the bait from the trap without springing it. Great. What about the bottom cupboard where the cornmeal box used to be? Oh. Oh dear.

There was a whole layer of mouse droppings in this cupboard (despite there being no available food in it), and in the adjacent cupboard (which has never had any food in it).

With brush and shovel in hand and droppings and carpet fluff cleaned away, I went on a further investigation of the super-highway.

The rubbish bin and paper-recycling area yielded further copious quantities of mouse droppings, and some nibbled cardboard.

sigh.

I turned to the internet for advice. It is not comforting. A house mouse can have a litter of up to 6 pups, each month. One mouse usually means a nest. They don't usually range far from their nests, so if you see a mouse the problem is likely to be yours - not your neighbours (not that I thought for a second that my neighbours, all of whom have large dogs, and are more obsessive about their sections than us, were the source of our infestation!). The advice boils down to: seal up all holes larger then 1.8cm (a U.S. dime was the 'measurement' given - so then I had to look up how big a dime was - annoying), trap, trap, trap the highways, poison in the roof and floor cavities, get rid of clutter (which is a nesting place haven) and if that fails, call in the professionals.

So we went out. I needed to run away from the problem for a little while.

And then we came back and the day continued along its happy course. We had dinner, we said goodnight, we put the kids to bed. I availed myself of the bathroom...

A mouse ran into the bathroom.

I could do nothing except lift my feet off the floor and squeek "eeek mouse! go away!" (I didn't want the kids to leap out of bed to investigate). It ran behind me, and I couldn't see it! And I am now hugely pregnant and can't twist around at all, so I was just stuck there with my feet in the air hoping the mouse would get back where I could see it, because I knew there was no exit at ground level behind me and I sure as heck did not want it climbing...

Fortunately it ran out to behind the door.

I made my escape with all due haste, leaving it an escape route into the laundry (and thence out the back door, I hope!).

I have since set all the traps we have - 4 of them - mostly in the kitchen and one in the living room.

I do not know the exact route the super-highway takes - it concerns me that there were scratchings at both living room doors - trying to get out of the living room. I have no idea where an entrance point in that room might be - unless there is a largish gap in the floorboards somewhere behind the couch or piano, or possibly through our disused fireplace. At 30 weeks pregnant, however, I am not shifting the piano to find out! (Merl can do that this weekend).

There is no earthly way of effectively sealing the underside of this house. We know one entrance point for the mice is in the kitchen, where the sink and dishwasher pipes exit the house, but there are nooks and crannies everywhere for them to come in.

Properly ridding the cellar of clutter is on our 'list of things to do'. The underneath of our house is packed to the brim with hoarded building, gardening, painting, you name it supplies from the previous owner. Loads of stuff that is just junk - it might have 'come in handy one day' if it hadn't been stuck in a damp mouldy cellar for 40 years. Now it's all just a rusted, rotted pile of junk. Which we bought with the house. At some point we will get around to hiring a skip and clearing it out, but thus far that has fallen into the 'not this weekend' category. This provides nesting-sites aplenty for mice - right beneath our floorboards.

And that's pretty much where our mouse situation is at. I heard one of the traps go "sproing" while I was typing this, and I'm in two minds as to whether to go investigate it this evening - giving the trap the chance to trap another mouse overnight - or to wait until morning and check all the traps at once.

I'm also not that keen on actually handling dead rodents. I don't know what diseases they commonly have in this country, but I doubt that they can be good for unborn babies (given that we're not supposed to deal with cat faeces, I can't see that dead mice is any better).

I'll need to find my disposable vinyl gloves.

Read more...

ta daa!

Play fort complete!

What you see here is Dad getting the cement ready to fill in around the posts, while Miss4 gets her first sit inside. It now also has a ladder attached down the front where Merl is standing. Brilliant. I'm thinking that underneath is a prime place to move the sandpit to, come summertime.

In other news around the house, I've got some photos of what's been happening in the garden lately. First up is the gooseberry bushes and rhubarb that I planted. Here they are in their not-quite-final resting places. The gooseberry starts are just small dead-looking twigs, and the rhubarb is dormant, so believe me, a closer shot wouldn't have shown you any more :) Although you might have been able to see my classy re-used envelope plant labels. The bush you see at the far left is a dahlia, then just in from there is my wee garlic patch, then two gooseberries, then the rhubarb crown near the righthand-end. I edged the garden with branches from our trees which lately received a much-needed cutting back. The mulch is mostly leaf-litter, with some lime and blood-and-bone sprinkled on and forked in. Our dear friend who gave us the goozies says I have planted them too close together, but upon looking it up in a gardening book to see just how far apart they should be planted, I see that they are often planted close for the first year then transplanted to their final spots once they're more bush-like. So that's good - one job that can wait until next year!

Here is our wee Meyer Lemon tree, gifted to us from my Dad. He'd been unable to get it to fruit down at his place, but we have a much milder micro-climate here so we'll give it a go. I am very pleased, as I was going to go buy one and just happened to mention it to Dad in passing. He then promptly offered us his, and also my Nana's, which was also at his place in a pot. It's now at our place too, re-potted, and in a sunny spot. We shall see if we have more luck than Dad. I've promised him some lemons if they do prove fruitful up here on the hill.

I also have begun using very un-organic poison on an ivy that is growing up one of our fences. I've drilled holes into the trunk and poured un-diluted poison into the holes, so it's a very very targeted use of poison. Ivy must die. Can't stand the stuff and can't understand why anyone would plant it in this climate - it just runs rampant. And besides, I need the fence-space for the fruit trees I plan to espalier along there... I'm thinking an apple, a plum and perhaps an apricot or a peach if I can get heirloom varieties that will suit.

I haven't looked into it but I'm guessing it is too late to order them for this year, but that gives me a year to prepare their spots with legume crops, good mulch and other goodies.

Or perhaps I'll just nip down to the garden centre and buy the first ones I see. You never can tell :) Read more...

tool time, people

Our Play Fort arrived yesterday! So we spent several hours today getting started on putting it together. My Dad came and helped out for a couple of hours this morning, digging holes, getting the posts in and the floor level. Then friends arrived for lunch and we had a break from fort-building to make sushi!

After our friends departed we spent about another hour and a half putting the top walls in before darkness and dinner.

If the weather holds we'll finish off tomorrow by bracing the legs, attaching the climbing wall and ladder, and cementing the posts into the ground.

I'm so excited! I would have loved to have a tree house as a kid, so I'm pleased to have one now that I'm a grown-up. Even if the kids spend no time in it (which I think unlikely, given how many times we had to lift them down off the step-ladder today), but even if they don't, I think it will be a great place to lie down with a cold drink and a book come summer time!

Almost as good as a hammock - or perhaps even better - there's nowhere to rest your drink to turn the page in a hammock.

So I'm hoping that the promised Southerly Change will hold off for another day. It was supposed to come yesterday afternoon, and then this afternoon, but as you can see from the pictures, there has been not a sign of bitterly cold Antarctic winds, sleet or even rain.

Long may it continue!
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Get thee gone, Oh big desk!

We just rearranged our Living Room!

Ever since we moved into this house I've been lobbying to replace our great big desk which took up a whole corner of our living room, and squished the couch up against the piano so we couldn't use it easily, and created a huge 'junk magnet' surface area, but no pay-off of drawers or shelves underneath it.

So, instead of just whingeing about it, I prayed about it with a friend last week (it only took me a year of being annoyed about this desk to think about asking God if there was a solution), and the next day I dragged Merl to a second hand office furniture shop and he saw a style that met some but not all of his requirements. And then the next day Merl was talking to someone from church who said "Oh, we're about to move house and need to get rid of some desks - just come over and help yourself!" So he had a look, and there was one that was just perfect! for free! yay.

So now we have a living room with couch and chairs in a cosy arrangement around a corner bookshelf, a very usable piano (hooray!), a computer out of reach of Miss1's fingers, and we rearranged the kids' books as well. So that's all good. Read more...

Zero-waste catch-up

Well, we're not doing so well this week on the whole Zero-waste thing. Miss1 has had a bad nappy rash, which I was attempting to treat with lots of 'nappy off time'. But after 2 days in a row of hunting down where that smell was coming from and inadvertently stepping in it and having to bath a poo-covered baby, wash my shoes and scrub the carpet, I have decided that 3 days of disposables with frequent changes to keep her dry will be better for my sanity, if not the environment! Happy to report that the rash is much better. But I've wiped out about 3 weeks worth of progress as far as waste reduction goes.

I think that we'll go back to using disposables at night - perhaps every second night. She does seem to get quite soggy at night-time in cloth, and if she's eaten something a bit acidic (oranges, tomatoes, yoghurt...) then her poor wee skin takes a hammering.

In other news, I am starting to pull more stuff out from the cellar and list anything vaguely sale-able on TradeMe. Babysteps though - I don't want to get overwhelmed with too much stuff sitting in the house waiting to be sold! Just a couple of items at a time. And I'll freecycle or appropriately donate anything that doesn't sell. Listed this today.

It feels good just to have moved something out of the cellar and to be doing something with it! There is in unbelievable amount of clutter under there - the previous owner was a builder and he stored anything that 'might come in handy one day' under the house. Vast quantities of random bits of wood etc. Also lots of 'empties' - empty boxes, empty sacks, empty bottles, jars, buckets, planter pots... lots of stuff that will go straight to freecycle or a skip I think. Read more...

Oh, and the plumber...

We got the plumber's bill today.

$338.88

sigh

that's a d@mned expensive cylinder insulation. Read more...

Enter the plumber...

Nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems.

After the 'mild' jostling that the hotwater cylinder received yester-evening, I woke in the night aware that the cylinder sounded like it was still filling up from after the dishwashering. Upon inspection (at midnight, of course) I discovered a very small leak from the pipe leading out of the top of the cylinder. And the sound of a lot more water running somewhere else - probably under the house (where our overflow empties to).

hmmm.

Still, there is nothing I could do about this at midnight in my PJs (or in fact at any time in any attire, since I have zero skills as a plumber), so I put a small plastic container out to catch the drips from the inside pipe and went to bed.

About morning tea time I ventured under the house to see if the water was still flowing down there. Oh yes. Oooh yes.

One call to the plumber, 2 1/2 hours of plumbering time, and a few bits of pipe later, we have a happy cylinder again. We had inadvertently cracked the joiny-up-bit of the inlet pipe (note my extremely technical jargon). So at least it wasn't hot water that was filling up our cellar.

Yay.

So, not as straight-forward as it first seemed. Nor as cheap. Nor as energy efficient in the immediate term, given that we had to empty the entire cylinder of lovely hot water for the nice plumber man to fix it. But still probably worth it in the long term.

or so I am led to believe. Read more...

Oh, we are soooo energy-frugal now!

Today we wrapped our hotwater cylinder. ta daa!

I read somewhere the other day that if your cylinder is rated anything other than AA or AAA you should invest in some insulation for it. I dutifully toddled off to the hot-water cupboard, and what do you know?

F

But of course. So today we gave our cylinder a snuggly warm coat. It was not as straightforward as it first appeared. After much wiggling of the cylinder to get the wrap to fit between cylinder and wall, we gave up on the last bit and just jammed it in place - so about 10cm of cylinder is not cosily warm, but we figure anything is better than an F.

And just don't ask about the various tapes we tried - suffice it to say that a whole roll of duct tape went into the bin as being distinctly substandard (it did not adhere, neither did it have strength), and the foil tape was just like sticky tinfoil, and just as flimsy. Yay for masking tape; is there nothing it cannot do? Read more...

House dreaming

I was visiting Mum this morning while she got a visit from the community contact person from the Hospice. The Otago Community Hospice is a fabulous facility that do a wonderful job. But that is beside the point.

While I was 'round home, Mum passed on to me a small pile of New Zealand House and Garden magazines. Aaaaah. bliss. There is nothing quite so indulgent as sitting curled up on the couch with a pile of interior decorating pornography.

Don't get me wrong - I like my house just fine the way it is. Okay, the carpet in the living room is the ideal camouflage for baby poo and spilt dinners, and the laundry is the room with all the morning sun, but I can live with these things. (or at least, I can live with them being on the 10year plan to change them). But I do like to dream.

I dream of ripping out several internal walls and making one big kitchen/dining/living space, which would necessitate a total kitchen re-do. Of re-doing the bathroom - to install a bath, for instance - of extending the dining area into a conservatory. Even of putting a whole 'nother floor on top, with 2 bedrooms and another bathroom up there. Heck, those rooms might even get 'sea views' and 'all day sun' - big, big selling points if we were ever to re-sell.

And then I think - if someone gave me $100,000 to do whatever I want with it. What would God want me to do with it?

So I live with this unease. On the one hand there are things that could easily be done to make our house a bit more user friendly. On the other hand there are a billion starving people in the world who'd love the chance just to live somewhere as well-appointed as our garage (leaking and drafty as it is). Read more...