A mouse in the house

Shortly after Christmas, one of our cats escaped out the basement door. Not-so-coincidentally it was the same day this happened. In the commotion of dealing with the water and having the plumber over, the door was left open for a couple of hours. The snuggly kitty stayed in and the mouse-killing-always-trying-to-escape kitty left (we did get him back about a month later, fortunately).

Unfortunately, while he was away a mouse got in the house. I came down with the brave new toddler early on a work day. The snuggly kitty was acting very odd, hunkered down in front of the oven. With a heavy heart, I looked under the oven with a flashlight and .... yeah.

Obviously the mouse didn't get into the house from that area - otherwise he would have disappeared. Since we had one potentially effective cat in the house, I pulled the oven away from the wall. Snuggly kitty rushed in. 30 seconds of squeaking later he came out with the mouse! Then he jogged to the dining room table, released the mouse to play, and promptly lost it. Idiot.

But I did see where the mouse went - it bolted to the corner of the dining room where the baseboard heating pipes run. After waiting a few minutes, I stuck my face in the corner. It certainly had at least an inch of space and was quite drafty. The quick solution was to fill in the corner with steel wool and seal the entire length of the wall with expanding foam.

It doesn't look too good, but it's a bit less drafty and hopefully more mouse proof. I may try to razor off the excess foam in the future and see if it's paintable. If I could paint it black, it would be invisible.

Snuggly cat was disappointed with the solution, though.

Things that go growl (and squeak) in the night

We already knew one of our cats was a mouser and when he caught a mouse in our home a year ago June, we were grateful for it. But something I haven't blogged about are all the mice he's caught since then...

Since this past spring, it's been the same routine, about once every 6-8 weeks: we wake up in the the dark - usually between 3 and 4am, but once as late as 5:55 - to the sound of growling on the little white rug beside the bed. Growling from our kitty only means one thing around here - mouse! And he'll keep sitting there, growling, until we acknowledge him. He wants us to know how awesome he is.

Light goes on, and indeed, kitty has a mouse in his mouth. If we make a move for it, he goes downstairs where we follow. Then try as we can to take it away from him, he manages to gobble it up. He's getting better at it. He used to swallow it whole, which always makes us worry he's going to choke. But lately he's learned to gnaw them in half first (natural toothbrush!). Once night, he presented us with a live mouse, so we were awoken by "grrrrrrrrrrrr.....SQUEAK SQUEAK......grrrrrrrrr.....SQUEAK." Then, after following him downstairs, we watched him finish the poor little critter off.

We're glad that, like most cats, he seems to want to show off his prize. It lets us know that we have mice. Because we wouldn't know any other way - we haven't seen or heard any sign of them.

But that's the problem, and the reason for this post. One mouse every month or two didn't seem so bad. Even though we didn't seem to have this issue until about 6 months ago, having an occasional tiny gray mouse - when we live in a suburb with a yard and trees and other outdoor critters - seemed like part of the package, along with spider crickets, spiders, moths, stink bugs, etc. But now, maybe because it's starting to get cold out, the frequency has dramatically increased. In fact, this week he caught a mouse on Wednesday and one last night. On Wednesday he was obliging enough to give D time to get a photo:

Do you think we need to call in professional help? Is this something exterminators would handle? Or do we need some kind of general contractor who would help us seal off our home? Because we don't really need help with the former. But since we aren't seeing signs of mice (until they're in this vicious beast's mouth), we have no idea where they're getting in, and they're so tiny the possibilities seem endless. 

We have to do something, don't we? Or do we just praise and reward our cat (who is probably having the best time EVER!) and let him continue to do all the work?

Cutting it down to size

J's old desk chair was obtained from some random big box store. It's a wobbly ill-shapen mess that has become increasing fragile due to the over-use of cardboard in its construction. We've kept it for so long for a simple reason - J's desk is a very odd height. It's counter-height, but with a drawer below it. So, it's effectively halfway between a counter-height chair and a dining room chair. Which is not a common height.

During our many trips to Ikea to pick out baby furniture we found that the new Ikea INGOLF was, at least by eyeball, about the right height. So we bought it, figuring that if it was too tall, we could always cut it down.

After bringing it home and building it, we found, of course, it was about 2.5 inches too tall.

So, out came the mitre boxes, rulers, tape, pencils, and wood saws. First I taped off the legs (hoping to reduce splitting of the veneer when sawing), then I marked off 2.5 inches from the bottom of the feet on all sides. It was tricky because the legs are curved.

I then got the bottom of the leg at a right angle to the side of the mitre box. Just with some eyeballing. I was very concerned I would be cutting the legs off at an odd angle, but I didn't have a good idea how to cut it to precisely 90 degrees. 

I had two wood saws, with about the same saw tooth shape and size. But one only got through about 1/8 of the leg with 60 seconds of furious sawing, while the other got through the entire leg in less than a minute.

Did this three more times and was relieved to find that the chair was mostly level, despite my sloppy measuring and cutting. I then chamfered the bottom edges of the feet with a Dremel, so they would be less likely to split in the future.

The boss approves.

Another unwelcome present

I mentioned on Monday that we planned to let the cats into our breezeway to scare away mice with their scent and presence. Little did I know how effective their presence would actually be. Last night after work we let our cats out. One wanted to come in immediately but the other, more of a hunter, decided to hang around. Five minutes later we heard some noises and then got this little show outside the door to our kitchen:

 He could not understand why we wouldn't open the door and let him in to show off his prize:

It took a little work getting him to drop the mouse (we had to sneak in from a different door and tempt him with lots of treats) but he finally let go. He was so proud of himself the rest of the evening. We were proud of him too, though a little disgusted.

Not exactly the humane trap we planned, but it sure worked...

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...

Things that go growl in the night

Here's a tale of two hopefully not unrelated episodes--

The first is that every once in a while, usually in the evening, I have been hearing scurrying behind our kitchen cabinets. I know I'm not imagining it, because the cats also seem to respond to the noise, looking around curiously like they know something is there, but they're not quite sure exactly where or how to get at it.

The sounds was coming from this set of cabinets:

This is an exterior wall, so when I couldn't find any kind of mouse/rat/bird/bat/crazy big insect activity coming from inside the cabinets, we checked the gutters on the other side of the brick, but also saw nothing. We did a quick inspection for any holes nearby, but besides the microwave vent, which is tiny and louvered, nothing is an obvious entrance. We never did figure out what's going on behind there...

But then a couple of nights ago, we woke up to the sound of one of our cats yowling and growling (yes, growling--it was a spooky sound coming out of a cat). He would come in and growl at me in the bedroom and then when I tried to see what was the matter, he would run to the stairs. I wanted to ignore him, since it was 5am, but the sound actually made me scared we had some emergency health issue. D finally went to investigate and let the cat lead him downstairs. Then I heard him shout, so of course by then my adrenaline was racing and I went down too.

A mouse, very dead and partially devoured, was stuck in kitty's teeth. As we ran for paper towels, gloves, etc, I obviously was too busy to get a picture. But let's pretend it was something like this:

Because seriously the real picture would be much much more disturbing.

D pulled it out of the cat's mouth finally (after a brief moment where it looked like the cat was going to try to swallow it whole and had just its behind and tail hanging out and I had visions of how we might have to do the kitty Heimlich) and threw it outside in the garbage.

Since then, I haven't heard any noises. Now I'm not saying the two incidents are related, but it sure would be nice to have that loose end tied up.

(Even if the sound I was hearing was that mouse and it is now in mousy heaven, that still doesn't really solve the question of how it got in to begin with. But I'm trying not to think of that right now.)

Plants and a Planter

Bonus points to the reader who can identify these pretty little purple flowers:

They grow on the side of a nearby property and make such lovely ground cover. We are in a long-term process of removing unpleasant invasive ground cover from our property (ivy, liriope, etc) and trying to replace it with something prettier, less prone to spreading, and less likely to harbor scary creepy crawlies. So if you can help us figure out what this is, you will be our hero!

And because I don't just want to make this post all about asking what you can do for me, I'd like to share a cool plant-themed find we made recently: The SOCKER Greenhouse by Ikea (and I'd been so good lately about not mentioning Ikea on the blog!)

But seriously, this thing is really cool! It helps to insulate plants in a microclimate that is slightly more humid and warm, it looks pretty darn awesome, and most importantly, let's us keep cat-unfriendly plants around the house without hurting our pets.

In this case, we have two spider plants sandwiching a jasmine plant. None of these are harmful to cats but we found out the hard way a few years ago that spider plants are basically cat LSD, so they would get devoured if the cats got access.

Now, does it increase the odds of us actually keeping a plant alive? Probably not. I took this picture a couple of months ago and the jasmine plant has already gone to plant heaven. But it's probably not hurting.

Days 3 and 4: Plumbing, Electric, and Backerboard

Two noisy days later and we're still in the early stages of the remodel. Yesterday they moved the GFCI outlet away from the switches, closer to the vanity, and they put up backerboard on the vanity/toilet wall.

Today they plastered the seams on that wall and pulled out the old insulation from the exterior wall.

We also got our first hint of what the bathroom will look like when they brought in our pretty new tub! No more pink!

There was a tiny setback last night when we noticed some new copper plumbing extending up to where a typical shower head should be installed, despite the fact that we are getting a special slide bar system with the water hose offset to the side. A quick call to the designer to check in and today the plumbing was rerouted to its proper location off to the left:

One additional (more costly) setback--the vent fan on the ceiling has been removed to reveal that there is no duct work venting to the outside. The fan is just pulling the humidity into the attic. Building a pipe to the outside was not included in our contract but it was something we anticipated we might need, so now we just have to find out how much our crew will charge for the additional labor and materials and decide what to do.

By now our team of contractors have almost completely taken over the extra room to store materials and cut them to size. They put up plastic to protect the few pieces of furniture we have in there, but I'm really glad we've kept that room mostly empty and unpainted..

*******

On a completely unrelated note and in response to a comment from this post, here is my adorable King Kong kitty doing his best beached whale impression. You can see how the fat rolls completely envelop the poor villagers.

Fiber Snob

I love to knit. And not just with anything. Only the best yarns appeal to me: fine and exotic wool, silk, alpaca, mohair, linen, cotton. Basically, something that actually exists in nature and not just in a chem lab. (More on this theme in a couple of other posts over the next few weeks.)

Why does this matter on a home decorating blog? Because my love for fancy fibers bleeds over into my decorating. We've been on a quest to find some pillows for our sofa. We found one pair many months ago from Pottery Barn that perfectly complimented the blues and reds of our decor. And better yet, in a linen/cotton blend! They live on our leather sofa and are oh so comfy for a mid-afternoon nap, being perfectly stuffed with just the right amount of feathers. That's right, no polyfill for me! (At least not when I can help it.)

The gray sofa did not get such special treatment, and kept two pillows on it from our old apartment made of blues, browns, and greens. It didn't clash, but it just didn't look right. Here's an old picture, just to show you the pillows I'm talking about. See? Kinda blah. (The red/blue one is on the left.)

But all that changed last week when I was bargain hunting on Pier 1's website. A teal mongolian wool pillow (still on sale! snap one up now while the link still works!) Made of real wool! (You laugh, but Bed, Bath, and Beyond and Target were both selling Mongolian "wool" pillows made of 100% polyester.) Be still my heart! Suddenly in the mood to keep hunting, I also found a beautiful red silk pillow, also on sale. So I submitted my order (they do a nifty in-store pick-up kinda thing) and then, in store, found some beautiful citronella lamps in the exact same shades (they'll live indoors when not in use, but obviously will only be lit out on our porch).

Aren't they pretty!? In addition to being a soft, comfy place to rest my head, the teal pillow makes a wonderful cat substitute if I need something to pet when no one's around. And the colors go perfectly into our decor.

Last year we also invested in a beautiful Jacob sheepskin--yes, it looks like a cow hide, but it's really sheep--which we thought would look nice in back of the sofa and would be a nice place for the cats to lay. Well the cats couldn't care less but we think it's a nice textural accent. So here's the sofa now (complete with kitty--must have felt jealous of the pillow).

Insulation and Some Expensive Discoveries

Hi there! We haven't posted much because we've been so busy doing work (and paying other people to do work) that there hasn't been any time to blog! But rest assured that the next few are pretty exciting and reflect some major changes. Today, I bring you the follow-up to my post on our energy audit. We agreed to most of the recommended updates to the house and had some workmen come fix up our attic (both the knee walls and the actual top of our house) and basement (in the laundry room area as well as the crawl space). Five guys spent almost 8 hours helping us stop air flow into and out of our house. How did they do it? Read on:

First they headed to the knee walls, the storage attics in our upstairs bedroom with the tiny Alice-in-Wonderland-sized doors. Originally, their proposal was to fill the knee walls to thoroughly insulate them, rendering them inaccessible and useless. I requested that they come up with a new idea that would let us keep our storage space. And it was a good thing I did--we had to empty everything so that they could get in and work, and it was amazing how much we've managed to hide in there in just the 18 months that we've lived here.

So they brought in these giant insulating boards (all of these things have R values, i.e. how much energy they save, but those figures escape me). The boards were so huge they had to cut them in half just to get them up the stairs.

Next they drilled tiny holes into our attic floors, spaced so that there was one hole over each joist. Why? Well, that comes later.

Next the shiny boards got installed on all the outer walls. As you can see from the above picture, we had some insulation in there already. So they didn't need to add much into the roof joists before installing the boards. The boards got sealed with foam to further block out air flow. Now our knee walls look like little rocket ships!

(By the way, these guys were really awesome and let me take pictures and always were happy to show me what they were doing. Contact me privately if you want their information.)

Just that step took them a while and there was one guy in each of our knee walls for most of the morning. When they finally finished putting up the wall insulation, it was time to "dense pack" foam into those little holes in the floor. They ran a tube from the insulation truck (yes, there was a truck which has a singular purpose of blowing foam) through our windows and into each little closet, filling the joists up with foam to block air leaking in where the wall and roof meet. They had to be careful not to fill joists that corresponded to our over-sink lamp in the kitchen, because it burns too hot, so there was a lot of measuring to make sure that they only insulated in the right places.

The sound and appearance of the fluff traveling through the hose was really cool, so I tried to get a video for your viewing and listening pleasure (make sure you have your sound on):

(OK, not that exciting I guess. Unfortunately Blogger will only upload it as such a low quality that you can't really see the fluff through the hose. I guess you had to be there. But hey, first posted video! Go me!)

Next they covered up the clothes in our closet and cut what apparently was a man-sized hole in the ceiling to get to our otherwise-inaccessible attic. It was here that we encountered our first snag. Apparently there were some wiring issues up there (not a real surprise, I guess) that actually cause one guy to get a shock! There was a splice or two that needed to be put in a junction box and something up there was shorting out our circuit (thank goodness for circuit breakers). Since insulating up there would make it hard to access these problems and because, in the words of one of the contractors, "the insulation is flame retardant, but I still wouldn't want to put it near a known fire hazard" we had to halt work on the attic.

They installed this lovely "sealed" board that the electrician would be able to easily removed and agreed to come back later once we had the problem fixed. (It has been by now, but that's for a different post.) We still haven't managed to find a time to get the energy guys back out to insulate up there, but I'm sure that will happen soon.

And so it was on to the basement! A team headed downstairs and started insulating our crawl space. They noticed that it was actually possible to see our first floor from up through the boards in the basement and since the crawl space is (was) essentially outside, it's no wonder that the half of the house over the crawl space was always so cold in the winter. So they packed a lot more insulation up between the floor joists and then nailed up panel similar to what they put in our knee walls upstairs. They enclosed the pipes in the insulation too, so theoretically the hot water in the heat system will still be hot by the time it reaches the guest room and office.

This is also where problem two was discovered, though it wasn't something that halted work. One guy noticed that a sewer pipe running down the corner of the crawl space was a little damp. That wasn't good. He deduced from looking at the pipes that the problem was probably in our second-floor bathroom. We immediately stopped using it and started trying to find a plumber (again, already done and the subject of anther post).

In the laundry room, the guys put up some insulation along the outside wall because little bits of sunlight were actually visible. The white puffy insulation was sealed off with more orange stuff and should make the basement a little more pleasant, temperature-wise. There should also be less humidity down there, and in fact we are already noticing that the dehumidifier isn't turning on as often as it was just before we had the basement fixed.

So the final results from all of this work? Well, the guys started and ended the day with another round of blower door tests. Just like back in February when they did the audit, their morning reading was about 7000 cubic feet per minute, which means that a lot of air flows through the house (for reference, new homes are at about 2000 cfm). After all that work, which doesn't even include the attic, we got a reading of 3500 cfm. That was an incredible 50% difference. What this should mean for us is that it will be easier to heat and cool the house and maintain our desired temperature, because we won't be losing our warm/cool air by having it leak through all these cracks. The upstairs should not be as hot in the summer and the half of the house above the crawl space should not be as cold in the winter. So we're keeping our fingers crossed.

What were the cats doing during all this commotion? Well we stuck them in one of the rooms that wouldn't need any work and they spent much of the day trying to escape through the tiny crack under the door:

Exhaustion and Desperation

Thatching and dropping seed didn't really do much, so it's time to bring out the big guns. We spent Sunday raking little rows into the ground and putting Scotts Patch Kit everywhere we could. We also looked into getting our soil tested, but it's been way to wet to go out there and dig up some samples. It's on our to-do list, though. We're thinking of sending off three unique samples: front lawn, back lawn, and front flower beds.

Every weekend (at least for now while it's not scorchingly hot with man-eating mosquitos) we've been trying to get out and coax our lawn and garden back to life. Obviously our hard work and desperation seeped through into real life and my parents are taking pity on us and coming to help us this weekend.

Knowing when to quit, we decided that despite the fact that we want to plant edible things, this year we're going to stick to planting them in pots, that way they will take less weeding and care and we won't have to build a garden that would probably just fail anyway.

So here we have basil and cilantro (in theory, one day):

Parsley and cilantro in these little guys (which will live inside on our window once they germinate; for now they live in our upstairs hallway in the warmth and darkness):

(We're growing a lot of parsley and cilantro because they are last year's stock and were stored pretty improperly, so if any germinate at all, it will be a small miracle.)

We're also starting some 2011 seeds: cherry tomatoes and scallions (and more basil) to transplant into large outdoor pots (thank you, Costco).

Even if none of these grow, we won't be out too much money or effort, at least.

Finally, a couple of questions to anyone who might know flowers. I've been operating under the assumption for two springs now that these plants are roses. I've been researching how to deadhead and prune them and what to feed them. I'm only finally coming around to the fact that they are probably not roses at all. Now I realize that there are a lot of kinds of roses. But these don't smell like roses, they don't have thorns, they have barky stems all the way up to the flower, and they bud in twos and threes.

So what the heck are they?

Flower identification question number two: these are everywhere and look a little like dogwood but I'm pretty sure they aren't (dogwoods have clumpy little pistils in the center, don't they?). So what's your guess:

While we slave outside to make the yard look nice, these guys loll about on the window and watch. On a recent vacation, we saw a ceramic "beware of cats" sign that looked custom made for our babies, so we couldn't resist. Don't they look like critters you need to beware of?