Winter is approaching here in the Great Frozen North, and that has been abundantly obvious in our house. After last year's mild winter, we're not quite as prepared as usual. This year, for the first time in our 2-some years in our apartment, we have had mice.
I suspect it will be a cold winter, because the mice have never visited before. We used to think that Lucy, our cat, just did an excellent job keeping the mice away. Now, we know that she is not a good mouser. We were storing bird seed in a bag in our hall closet, and I cleaned out the closet to discover evidence of the little nibblers. I might further add that mice are my second least favorite visitors after rats. I don't mind mice outdoors, but they don't belong in my house.
I have since put the bird seed into a bin and set traps in the closet. We moved the stove and stuffed steel wool in a hole there, but we were still catching mice in the closet trap. Ahh, the sink, we thought. I'll post this in a separate post (the pictures are on my phone), but our sink had a huge, gaping hole. We got maintenance to completely fix the sink, but still the mice were entering.
The last frontier? The fridge! We moved the fridge, and we discovered that the access panel for our bathroom plumbing was behind there. The board was only loosely duct-taped against the wall. Not effective for mouse prevention.
Matt has since screwed the board into the wall, and we haven't seen evidence of a mouse since. I'm hoping that was the last hole, but we continue to keep the closet trap set, just in case. And that's all the news from small-town Minnesota, at least for tonight.