Home Improvement

Dan and I are not big home improvement people. Sure, we like to get things settled, and we're not made out of money, so that has taken the form of us doing things ourselves. It's not hard; it's just time-consuming and exhausting. We tend to stay away from exhausting, time-consuming things that aren't inherently pleasurable. That having been said, we have a mouse problem. After multiple attempts with traps and exterminators (during the course of which we have managed to catch a mere one unfortunate baby mousy, of all things), we decided it was time to seal off all the nooks and crannies where it* could possibly get in. In an old unit in an old building, that generally means everywhere.

The darned mousy is getting bold as brass. It practically came out to visit with us while we were working the kitchen last night, and I'm pretty sure I saw the little bastard light up a cigarette. This is a no-smoking apartment, Mr. Mouse! We just need to make it clear that it's not welcome. And from the mouse's perspective, all those nooks and crannies practically made it look like a home especially made just for it.

Therefore, we are in the midst of undergoing a mass effort to seal off every cranny larger than one-eight of an inch through the use of silicone caulking, joint compound, and the sticky foaming filler known to me as Great "I-hate-that-stuff" Stuff. From little gaps in the trim to plaster that's falling down in the ceiling of the linen closet, this place has not been impervious to mice. We even pulled out the stove and sealed the holes and gaps around the pipes. We're treating this with the utmost obsessive-compulsiveness. There are lots of places that we're certain are not actual conduits for our mousy right now, but as we seal off the other obvious entrances (read: entrances with mouse poops around them) we realize that a mouse could very easily relocate and find a new way out. Hence the humongous effort.

It seemed like a good idea to use this as an opportunity to repaint the kitchen, too! "Why?" You ask. Well, we're in home improvement mode anyway. We're not the kind of people who do a little of this and a little of that to hammer away at a project when we get home from work every night. So while we're suffering through the fumes and the inconvenience of having moved everything around, so we may as well take advantage of it and repaint the kitchen now. Lord knows we wouldn't otherwise have gotten to it until at least February.

In the end, we'll probably still find the occasional mouse poop. But we're hoping this sends a clear message that it's not mouse friendly unit after all. This a pretty smart mouse, so we hope it gets the message.

* Where there is one mouse, there are many mice. I know this. But I can't bring myself to say the plural form. I can live with the idea that there is one mouse. Mice implies infestation. And I can't live with that. So I say mouse. At any point in this narrative where it seems like I may be fooling myself and that there might really be lots of mice, please humor me and forgive me for using the singular form for the sake of maintaining my sanity. Your narrator has a flawed perspective.