Mice are like cancer

After living in our house for 15 years, we can no longer say that we haven’t had mice. The boy had heard noise in his ceiling so we bought some poison pellets for them and put them out in little trays that I made out of tinfoil. I also bought 4 tubes of caulking and sealed up whatever gaps I could find in the foundation, including putting almost two tubes into D3’s window sill.

I also made extra poison trays out of the old Cheer detergent scoops that we had stacked up when we were still able to get powdered Cheer. I cut the bottom centimeter off the scoops and cleaned them. The down side about poison is you can tell it is being eaten but don’t often see the results.

I picked up six of the spring traps. Not the cheapie wooden ones but some upgraded plastic ones. I also picked up a bottle of scent bait to use in the traps.
These proved pretty good. Mice tend to leave a trail of feces on their paths so we placed the traps along these.
We caught two greys one night, and then another grey as well as a larger brown one a couple of nights later.

They had been into a small bag of nachos. We packed the chips in the laundry room into a storage tub. In the pantry, they got into some pop tarts and a bag of vegi sticks so all the non canned food there went into more bins.

The next week we picked up two more spring traps as well as some of the electronic noise night lights to use in the bedrooms and the kitchen. Then we found some rice around by the bin. Somehow they had gotten in the bin so we tossed the rice, and stacked boxes on the bin.

We caught another small brown one night, and another small brown on another night. Then one of the spring traps was triggered but did not catch anything. After a few more days, still none caught, but finding sign, and D3 was still hearing noises. We have not caught another mouse in the spring traps.

We picked up another four pack of the electronic noise makers to cover most of the other rooms. We also bought some of the glue traps to try those. Over the next two weeks we caught three more brown mice in the sticky traps. They are a bit more freaky to find still twitching compared to the dead ones in the spring traps.

It's been a week since the last one was caught. We haven't seen any more signs, and D3 hasn't heard them anymore. I don't know if we are again mouse free, or only in remission.