Rodent Wars Revisited

I read a book to the girls tonight about a little mouse who lives in a tiny house made of hay in the barn. All of his friends: the cat, the dog, the cow, the horse, and the farmer all squeeze into the house to bring him birthday gifts until finally the tiny hay house explodes. The whole time I was thinking "this mouse is TOTALLY ruining the hay for the rest of the animals, and WHY ON EARTH are the farmer, and the cat, and the dog not putting that awful thing out of its misery?

We have had a rodent experience that is the polar opposite of those sweet, cute little story book mice...the ones that you hope make it out of the claws of the evil cat. We have had rodents which have ruined our furniture, our sanity, and now it seems, our washer.

No longer do we hear the scamper of tiny feet in our ceiling, or the gnawing of tiny teeth on all the pecans stashed in our ceiling. Now instead, we smell the rank and sour scent of their urine which has apparently infiltrated the inside of our washing machine.

We started noticing the scent a couple of weeks after we started using the washer (which was stored all winter in the garage), but it happened to coincide with the period of time in which the exterminators were doing their thing in the house, and chalked it up to decomp. The strange thing is, the smell gets worse for a day or two after I do laundry, and then gets better. My Dad took the front off the washer, and found a nest behind the control panel, but even removing this has not lessened the smell. Now that we are doing more laundry since there are more people in the house, the smell is more or less constant. We had the appliance doctor out today, and he suspects that there is a nest up on top of the drum of my front loading washer. He feels that even if he were to tear apart the machine, find and remove the nest, and put everything back together, it is no guarantee that the smell will go away.

Do you remember where the washer and dryer are? That's right...in my work area. I stay in there at my desk until I feel nauseated and have to leave. I think that the mouse stench might be killing my brain cells. If that isn't, I'm sure the gallons of Lysol and air freshener that we have been pumping into the atmosphere is. I'm not the only one who has the pleasure of experiencing the aroma. The scent does not only linger in my work room, it wafts throughout the house, into the dining area right next to my craft room, and into my parents' room downstairs.

On a more pleasant note, my dad has been working hard at several projects around here. He built a floor to create an attic above the garage. We are already using the space for extra storage (for things that are mouse proof, of course!) He put in a fold-away stairway...

...which leads to the space above. It is really great!