NOMADICISTA

Some people look forward to celebrating anniversaries or birthdays, or attach special significance to graduations and the like.

Not me.

I'm celebrating the day that I finally sealed the last mouse out of the new house!

For almost a year (well, probably since the house was built 37 years ago) rodents have had free reign to come and go from the garage to the interior walls of the kitchen and living room. For whatever reason, the nitwit carpenters/drywallers left gaping holes in the walls behind the fireplace chimney and a large opening where the laundry supply and drain pipes existed inside the kitchen wall on the garage side.

There was a giant "Mouse Hotel" above the fireplace, behind the mantel where they had gotten in and chewed the fiberglass insulation into a giant nest.

All of this was exposed last year when Prakash got into a tizzy and ripped all of the paneling off of the living room walls and stripped the sheetrock halfway up the kitchen walls to expose dry rot. Since then, the mice have only to crawl under the loose-fitting garage door and come right in through the gaping holes.

They also made frequent use of all of the places inside the walls where the plumbers had cut ~square~ holes to run ~round~ pipes through. Each pipe had four triangle-shaped gaps leading directly into the crawl space. I've been filling these in for a couple of months, working in my "spare" time, stuffing the gaps full of stainless steel pot scrubber frizz and screwing hardwood blocks over the result. Some also got a good shot of expanding foam sealant embedded in the steel wool.

The last couple of weeks, I've been spending some rainy weather finishing that job, finding more cracks and crevices to stuff steel wool and foam into, and foaming up all of the holes that the electrical cables run through.

I bought a couple of rolls of fiberglass insulation and started replacing the long-gone insulation that was torn out last year. It is imperative that I keep the damn vermin out of the new insulation until I can get it covered with new sheetrock.

I built a concrete form on top of the mantel on the garage side and troweled mortar onto the form and chimney, creating a level, straight ledge that I could use to seal a plywood backing panel against to keep the mice from re-entering that way.

Along with all of this, I've upgraded some of the kitchen and exterior faucet plumbing, installed new electrical circuits (ALL of the lights and outlets inside the house except for one in the kitchen are connected to ONE 15 ampere circuit). I'm also installing telephone, video (cable), and computer network wiring to modernize the communications within the house.

Yesterday, I ripped out the old hole-in-the-wall laundry connection and replaced it with a modern, molded plastic wall station that contains two quarter-turn valves and an opening for the drain plumbing. A close-fitting trim piece covers the edges, and there's no way any critters are going to use it for a freeway.

Today, the first piece of sheetrock went up, covering the wall behind the laundry, and sealing up the last opening between the house and the garage. New electrical outlets, a switch for a new overhead light above the washer and dryer, and a timer for the water heater were installed while the wall was open.

If anything can get into the house now, it won't be through any of the areas I've worked on. In fact, I'm hoping that this is the end for wildlife intrusion into my indoor space. Oh, the mouse traps will still be set, how else am I going to prove to myself that they can't get in? Wait until I open a box and find a nest with four baby mice in it? No thanks.

The upside to all of this is that I've had my mouse-proof Housetruck to live in all this time. If I'd had to dwell inside the house while all this was going on, I'd be in a rubber room for sure.

you do realize that a mouse can get through a hole the size of a penny...


good luck!!!

Gee, thanks for the encouragement...

I've been sealing cracks and crevices larger than 1/16" in all the walls I work in. I've set up bright lights along the foundation footing and crawled under the house in the dark looking for light intrusion. I've used a mirror to inspect corners where I can't look directly at framing juctions and joints.

My goal is not only to lock out mice, but prevent larger bugs from coming in and to slow down the infilteration of outside air which causes heat loss. The original insulation was R-7, whcih I'm replacing with R-11, carefully installed. The R-7 was simply stuffed into the framing, with no effort to fluff it properly, or eliminate voids inside the framing. Any non-standard framing dimensions got a full batt of insulation stuffed into it, compressing the insulation and destroying it's value. I know that the rest of the house will still be in this condition, but on the areas I work on, the job is being done right.

Digging up a two-year-old boring topic instead of starting a new boring topic.

For whatever misguided reason, I've been putting a lot of work into the house for the last month. As it turned out, the construction and repairs described above didn't completely keep the mice from coming into the house, it only slowed them down a little. Last year, I tried sealing up some of the places that the plumbing came through the floor in the second bathroom, but the vermin were still able to come in from under the bath tub and from behind the fireplace. I went under the house to look and although I could apply more metal flashing to the bath plumbing, there was no way to do anything about the fireplace, the tiny cracks under the foundation that they were using to run through weren't accessible from the crawl space, I couldn’t even see into some of those corners.

So, I figured that if I couldn't keep them from coming in from the crawl space, then I needed to keep them out of the crawl space to begin with. This launched me into a complete reconnaissance of the foundation surrounding the house perimeter. I knew this needed attention anyway, but it was time to do it completely and repair any holes, cracks, etc that I found.

I ended up constructing and replacing a number of the foundation vent screens. The original screens had rusted out and the okies that owned this place before had shoved coarse hardware cloth into the vent holes, keeping out only the largest varmints. All of the vents were carefully fitted and caulked into place.

While I was at it, I used a mirror and flashlight to inspect the area where the concrete foundation and the sill of the house framing meet. I didn't really find anything there, but now I knew that it was secure.

The final step was to do something about the crawl space entry. When the foundation concrete was poured, a space was provided for entry, but it was just a gap in the forms, and had never been properly closed. Although there were straight vertical sides and the top sill, the bottom of the entry was just slumped concrete where it spilled around the forms. This meant that it was impossible to fit any kind of a door properly. The okies has a piece of plywood propped against it (or at least the plywood was there, I had to put it up) with a cinder block to keep raccoons and the like from scratching it out of the way and getting under the house.

This had to change, so I built some wooden forms and mixed up a bag of concrete, pouring a straight, level bottom sill. Now I had a smooth, square opening to work with. I applied pressure treated 2x4" wood along the top, sides, and bottom, and then cut the plywood to fit. After painting the plywood, I screwed it to the wood with numerous stainless steel screws.

So far, the repair seems to be working, no mice in the several traps in the house for three weeks.

A friend from Portland has been trying for over a month to organize a labor day party here, inviting several other friends and their families. It would be fun to hang out for a weekend and catch up with these folks, but the thought of trying to put out food and keep up with the dishes for such a crowd makes me cower in the corner. I decided that as a matter of self-defense, I need to have a kitchen space available for the guests, one that is separate from my Housetruck. As such, I've been getting the inside of the house a little more presentable so I can install a (temporary) kitchen sink and counter. The party goers will be told in advance to expect a certain level of primitive camping hospitality, i.e. bring your own food, utensils and beer, but I will provide hot showers, flush toilet, microwave, toaster oven, refrigerator/freezer, etc.

Since the inside of the house is basically a storage space, I needed to get some crap out of the way and begin some improvements. I started with the living room, which was being used to store some VW Rabbit dashboards, sheets of plywood, and a stack of boxes left over from moving three years ago. Once all of the was gone, I swept and mopped (finding lots of mouse debris in the process, left over from the last three years of them running wild in the house) and organized the next step in the job.

When I bought this place the helper I had got crazed on some coffee while I was away and used a crow bar and sledge hammer to demolish the interior of the house. All of the trim, doors, cabinets, and the cheap fake black walnut paneling went into the dumpsters. This left me with some bare walls. I did put some effort into the kitchen area a couple of years back, installing new insulation, additional electrical outlets, etc, then sheetrocking over the walls to create a new, clean space. It was time to do this in the living room.

Unfortunately, I can't just put up new sheetrock and call it good, I have to have a custom job...

The wall between the living room and the first bedroom is also the back of that bedroom's closet and the hall closet. The bedroom closet is deep, three feet by five feet. So deep in fact that I always wanted to put a laundry hookup into the closet so I can get my washer and dryer out of the garage and into a clean, conditioned space. If I was going to finish the living room wall, it was time to put in the laundry hookup.

So, that's what I did. While I was at it, I installed additional electrical outlets, ran video, phone, CAT5 network and audio cables to the living room and bedroom. All of the additional wiring terminates in the hall closet, where I will install any support equipment (routers, satellite receivers, cable decoders, etc). So here's a photo of all of that:



You can see the "media closet" on the left. I cut a section of the sheetrock inside the closet away so that I can access the wiring coming down from the attic. The wiring I installed in the rest of the kitchen and living room areas is visible coming through the top plate in the wall. There will be more wiring from the bedrooms and some feed wiring from the garage.

Putting in the wiring and plumbing required numerous trips under the house and into the attic. Uhg on both counts. No fun. While under the house, I found about another two months worth of projects, broken drain plumbing, foundation timbers that need jacking, vapor barrier to apply, etc.

I did luck out in the wiring department, though. A couple of weeks back, I went to the scrap yard to recycle some non-ferrous metals. While there, I noticed some #4 aluminum house wiring in a bin. I hooked it out and took it back to the scale for the operator to weigh so I could purchase it. He waved me off and told me to just toss it into the back of the truck, that it wasn't worth the effort to weigh and charge for! This wiring was installed for the circuit that supplies 240 volts to the dryer. A dedicated 20 ampere 120 volt circuit is installed for the washer, and I put in another dedicated circuit for the media/IP closet and the adjoining wall, which I expect will be where the home theatre will be located once I get furnishings moved in.

So, as of yesterday, the wall is ready for insulation. One small matter remained. The okies had put down laminate flooring. They did this while the wall had ¼" paneling on it. In many places, the flooring was installed underneath the paneling, so that it butted the lower plate of the framing. Now I was going to apply ½" sheetrock, which would have to lay on top of the laminate, effectively trapping it so that it couldn't be removed without cutting. Because I expect to replace this flooring, this wouldn't do, so I needed to trim the end of the flooring so that the sheetrock rested on the sub floor.

Problem is that none of my saws will cut close enough to the framing to do this properly. Neither of my circular saws will cut closer than 1½", and a router would be even farther away. I wanted to cut within ¾" of the framing. A call to a contractor friend to borrow a saw was not helpful, he told me that there are special saws that flooring contractors have that can do it, but that he didn't have one.

After the call, I thought about it for a while, figuring I could use a hand saw (difficult), or put a saw blade in an arbor and use it in my drill (dangerous). Then I had a flash of inspiration. I already had a saw that could do the job. In fact I have two! I scribed the line using a felt marker and got to work:



Yep, that's right, the okies that owned this place before me would have figured it out right away! Just use your chain saw, Jethro!

I did find that it helped a lot to slow the saw way down, so I connected it to the variable transformer in the garage that is part of the diversion load circuit for the solar power system. Using an electric saw meant that I wasn’t smoking up the house and throwing oil all over the place.

Spent some time in the evening yesterday putting up the first of the insulation in the wall. I'm insulating mostly for acoustic dampening, so that the noise from the living room doesn't migrate so easily to the rest of the house. Having the walls filled with fiberglass insulation will make the house quieter, and will dampen the acoustics of the living room, making the stereo/home theatre sound better.

Anyhow, back to work on it today. Maybe I'll get the sheetrock up and some paint on before the party. Still got to get some counter tops put up in the kitchen area before that...

Around here we poke steelwool in every hole and crevis there is and it works great. Give it a shot in those hard to reach places.

Tell me your not trying to getem with that chain saw

I laughed when I saw the picture of the chain saw. It takes a deft touch to cut accurately, but I think it was a very clever approach.

Where's Little Bunny Foo Foo when ya need him!?!

FWIW: I've used the steel wool method many times with much success.

The chain saw did an amazingly good job considering that I was running it freehand. I thought about trying to set up a fence and some kind of depth control, but it just wasn't worth it.

Yes, I've used lots of coarse steel wool in the course of this project. Also used stainless steel pot scrubbers too. You don't want to put regular steel wool against any copper plumbing due to corrosion problems. Steel wool and spray foam have got to be the most solid hole filler possible.

Now, a handy home and garden tip:

When I was going all around the foundation, I did find some small cracks that I wanted to caulk up. In order to make the repair last, and because I didn't want to use a half tube of caulking in each, I shoved the coarse steel wool into the cracks beforehand. After stuffing it in to allow a caulk bead depth of about ½", there were some strands that wouldn't stay in the crack. No problem, I'll just break them off, at which point I grabbed a few and yanked.

BIG MISTAKE !!!!!!

The steel strands bit into my index finger, cutting it almost a third of the way through in two places!!! They were like razor wires, and were much too strong to simply snap off. Next time I'll use scissors.

OOH! I remember, as a youngster, when my cousin did the same thing while pulling some wires apart from some electric go cart. He just yanked on them and the next thing you see is blood spurting from his fingers. That was fairly alarming when I was 13 years old.

Hey Dennis, You may be familiar with that Dick Curless song, Tombstone Every Mile. It is about them Hainsville woods in northern Maine, haulin' potatoes. I was born in Fort Kent, Maine. Way up there, but so is Carabou.

House repairs move forward, however slowly. The living room is waiting until I can get over to the city to purchase some sheetrock at the big building materials store. Here on the coast, a 4x8' sheet of ½" wallboard is $12, while over in the valley it's less than $6.

Time to get the kitchen kicked into shape. Here's a photo of it nearly three years ago when my insane helper was tearing out cabinets, walls, and the floor:



It was like pulling teeth to get him to put the floor back in before he disappeared back to California, but when he did the work, I had him leave a trap door in the floor so that I could get under the house without having to crawl on my belly the entire length.

I did replace the insulation and sheetrock on the walls back when I was doing the garage wall, but I got burned out on the whole thing and basically left it for "later"

Now is later. I want to put up at least a temporary counter top and get a functional sink put in. This means closing up the floor.

But before I do that, I'd better get the under-the-house-in-the-crawl-space stuff done while I can still use the trap door.

That was last week's project. Some wiring, some plumbing, and installing at least half of the plastic sheeting as a vapor barrier under this end of the house.

Here's a piccy of the trap door just before I dived down it like a rabbit into a hole for the last time:



I had one last task before I screwed the tongue and groove decking down, and that was to mortar up a suspicious hole that led under the foundation and out under the garage slab. Maybe a dead-end tunnel, but maybe a rodent freeway. It's blocked now.

More later, this is just a teaser without a photo of what I did today...

Sharkey- have you ever tried a couple of cats around the place to help keep the mice down? Sometimes cats aren't everyone's favorite pet to have around, but they do help keep the rodents under control. A side effect that is not all that helpful is that they also occasionally catch birds. We keep 2-4 cats around, and they don't catch all that many birds, but they do catch alot of mice out here in the country. Otherwise, in farm country we would be overun with the rodents.

Yeah, cats are OK, I guess, but I really don't want one. My vet tried to give me one after Trace died and I resisted. Too much loose hair around the house, cat litter boxes, cat food to buy, hairballs, fleas, stinky cat spray smell, etc. No thanks, I don't want to have a predator for a pet.

The Labor Day gathering came off alright. There were three couples, two with two kids each, ages 5, 2½, and 1. Camellia kept the bigger kids occupied.

We had a big dinner around the fire pit Saturday night, BBQ salmon, spuds, salad, wine, and s'mores for desert (I passed on these).

Sunday morning was an indoor event as it was windy and rainy. We hauled the picnic table into the house and set up a gas cook top in the garage. Waffles, eggs, pot after pot of coffee and continuous dish washing for the entire morning.

Here's a photo of the inside of the house about noon on Sunday when everyone else was out taking a walk around the property.



The kitchen counter is held up by three milk crates at each end. I got the sink plumbed in just before the first guests arrived. The living room was an empty cavern, except for the rugs, but that worked out well for the kids, gave them a large space to run around in without worries about knocking into things. The music was supplied via my old, oversized ghetto blaster set up on the (cold) wood stove, the tunes emanating from the computer that I used to record all my old 60's and 70's music cassettes. There was some more modern music on the computer too, including B-Tribe, Mark Isham, Michael Hedges, as well as James Taylor's more recent albums, etc. The five-year-olds were really stoked up on old Michael Jackson tunes, they brought their own CD of his hits. We finally had to take it away from them after hearing ABC for the tenth time.

Anyhow, a pleasant time was had by all and there's been some talk of trying to do it again for Thanksgiving, but we'll see.

I spent the day today rolling up rugs, taking down Xmas lights and uninstalling the kitchen sink. Back to being a work area, I still have a lot of sheetrock to hang, tape, mud and texture...

Hi there. I have also been struggling to get rid of mice - 6 trapped so far and it seemed to have gone very quiet for a week or so - but another has been spotted. So I have gone around plugging all the gaps I can find with steel wool - including some small gaps in the hearth where a gas/coal effect fire sits in the living room. My question is about safety - I know steel wool burns fiercely so have I introduced a fire hazard? The gaps are small and at the back and one side of the fire place. It will get warm under the fire basket but there will be no flame or fierce heat getting at the steel wool... but I'm still a bit nervous... what would you advise?

PS I'm plugging these small gaps because I actually saw a mouse run into the gap under the fire (unlit) a few weeks ago.

Cheers
Dave

Dave;

Very fine steel wool does burn rapidly, but my guess is that it would require a very large degree of heat to ignite coarse steel wool. The reason that steel wool burns well is that there is a lot of surface area combined with air spaces. You can mitigate this condition by filling the steel wool with some kind of filler after it's in place. Over here we have expanding foam sealant (a popular brand name, and de facto generic moniker: Great Stuff) which works very well and stops drafts too. As you read above, I used caulking to the same purpose. Also consider that stuffing the wool into a crevice compacts it, which might slow any combustion properties.

I'd suggest getting some steel wool of various densities and put on some pyrotechnics to determine it's flammability.

As a last resort, burning down the house is a good way to rid it of rodents...