Unwelcome Presents

There's no "before" picture, but trust me when I say that our breezeway has turned into a disgusting mess over the last few months. It held all our gardening supplies and soils; our lawn furniture; the cooler that we were too lazy to carry into the garage; some wood stain, sponges, and rags I was too lazy to put back in the basement; a dismantled tent; and various other things that didn't belong there.

With our appraisal date approaching, we realized that the room would look a lot more impressive (impressive=valuable) if we cleaned it out and made it look more like a, well, room.

We started clearing out the furniture and putting the messes away. There was a lot of dirt on the ground, which wasn't too strange since this room is almost just as much outside as in and because we work in there when filling up our potted plants. So we got out the push broom to sweep it away. Until we noticed that it wasn't dirt...It was mouse poop! It seemed we had one or more long-term residents in our breezeway, perhaps cousins to this poor little guy. Again, this room isn't exactly inside and the presence of mice doesn't answer the question of how one got into the house, but it was still horrible, nasty gross.

When we really started to look around once we realized it was poop, we noticed it everywhere. I couldn't believe we'd let this room get so disgusting.

Fast forward a few hours (and then again a few days later)--lots and lots of Clorox wipe downs on every major surface and then several rounds of bleach and water on the floor.

We wore masks and gloves and did the best we could to remove any trace of mice. More importantly, we cleared away all the junk and made the place a lot less welcoming, with fewer places to hide.

We also noticed a few stray hooks on the ceiling and so we got to bring our cute little lanterns out of hiding and hang them up inside, since we're not putting the tent up this year.

Our best strategy right now for keeping mice out? Making the place smell like cats (cat perfume...ew...). No, but seriously, we hadn't let the cats out into this room since it had gotten too cluttered and dirty. But now that it is cleaned and disinfected, we're letting them out to play and sniff around. We're hoping that their scent (and occasional presence) will keep the mice from making any permanent homes.

Best of all, after all the work we put in to making this room look neat and tidy, our appraiser complimented us on it. He commented that most times he's come across 3-season rooms like this, they've been used for storage and look messy and cluttered, and seemed pleasantly surprised to see that ours was a nice space to relax with chairs and tables. If he only knew what it looked like one week earlier...