Mouseketeers

So while I was tracing out pattern pieces in the living room, whilst watching... well, listening, to a dvd, I started hearing odd noises coming from the cooker.

A few weeks ago I had also started hearing scritchy pitter-patter in our ceiling/our landlord's floor, and so for those who've been longtime readers, you might remember an incident, about a year and a half ago, that we had here that lasted a few weeks.

Needless to say with the odd noises in the cooker, where the little perpetrators had crawled up and out of last time, I was not pleased. And I was also sure that contrary to our landlord's statements that they had no idea how this was happening, that there was some way that the little bastards could get in behind the cooker.

Now last time our landlady gave me a load of traps, and our landlord gave me a bag of steelwool, to plug up all the little holes around pipes under the sinks and stuff (the ones that hadn't already had that insulation foam sprayed there), to stop them getting in that way. While this works well, it doesn't work so well when you find out that behind the cooker is a square hole of about a square foot where the gas pipe comes in. That isn't sealed off. And it also seems to be that that particular wall has some kind of outdoor access, or something, because I can feel a cold draft coming out of it.

Anyway, I spent more time than I ever wanted to behind a cooker, which incidentally is a pretty gross place to be, especially when you find remnants of food from the previous tenants kid *ick*. I used the rest of the bag of steel wool and some packing tape to plug and tape that square hole in the wall off, so that at the very least any potential mice will be discouraged.

Here's hoping it works.