Sorry to not write yesterday; we've been dealing with issues at the farmhouse and the bathroom scale isn't there. But I was able to weigh later, and it looks like I am about .4 of a pound up over last week. In other words, not really a change. I think this is something I can knock down this week, though.
This week, we not only needed someone to come look for mouse ingress at the farm, but also had the a/c repairman out, and now we need a plumber. The farmhouse has leaks of hose bibs, faucets, and a dripping pipe in the garage (the latter of which was pointed out to me by the guy who was here to look for mice, we hadn't noticed it). The water pipes have the wrong joints and are probably on a failure trajectory all over the house. It's going to cost a lot to fix everything that's wrong. I think we'll to tear open a lot of walls. We spent time this evening trying to figure out how to store our furniture safely (if we put it in the older half of the house to work on the newer half, it will just be fodder for nesting mice).
If anyone ever tells you old farmhouses are romantic, tell them "Not so much."
Take care!
I will use the peppermint when we leave the house. The Orkin guy did some things, but I was kind of disappointed that he didn't put on a bunny suit and crawl around under the house or anything (he was too fat to get into the ingress into the crawl space). It's going to take more work to keep the mice out than just setting a few mousetraps in our attic, which is all he did.
The pipes in the farmhouse were installed 20 years ago, and they put in the wrong joints at that time. One by one there has been a failure here and there, which we would find by a soggy bit of ceiling. But it wasn't worth emptying the whole house and ripping out a lot of sheetrock just to find all the joints. I think that's what we're facing now, though. If we continue to go at it piecemeal, we won't be able to do things like paint or change the carpets without soon having to pull down wet sheetrock to get to a leaking joint. The house hasn't been painted for 20 years, nor has the carpeting been replaced, so it's getting to be high time.
We're talking about various ways to empty the house so that kind of in-depth work can be done. The best would be to build a 3-car garage and use it for storage of all our furniture and boxes of possessions until the house is renovated, but I don't think we have that kind of money. (It's going to cost a lot to fix the problems with the house also.) Plus, of course, garages aren't always proof against mice incursions. I also don't think we can afford the length of long-term storage that it will take (probably a year, given how booked up all the jobbers are). Our furniture is hardly worth the cost, though of course like all furniture, it has the virtue that its existence means we don't have to immediately buy new stuff. The farmhouse needs so much, and that brings up the discussion of whether to just sell it at a discount in its present condition and let all the fixes be someone else's problem. Our son is adamant we not sell, though.
So much to think about! Incidentally, after our first trapping binge, we haven't seen another mouse or evidence of one either. The cats might have helped, but I think all the trapping has been temporarily effective.