Out, out damned mice

No pictures today--we were too busy working. We're bone tired, and the work today was so nasty I can barely talk about it. But it involves six 5-gallon buckets of mouse shit.

When we left yesterday, the whole room on the north end of the attic was clean, but when we got there this morning, it was full--I mean FULL--of mouse droppings. So we finished pulling nails and taking out the framing from the walls that are being removed, and then we dug deep into the bones of the house and got every bit of mouse nesting material that we could find. I swear there was a bale of straw embedded in the eaves and buried within walls, and it was all full of rodent excrement.

I don't know if the mouse population has gotten the word yet, but their neighborhood is being gentrified, and they are being evicted. In case they don't understand our terms, we left 12 mouse traps behind baited with peanut butter.

I often say that I don't know how we ever knew anything before there was the internet, and today I felt that way again. When I first saw the size of the nests behind the walls, I thought the invaders were squirrels. We wanted to know what extermination measures to take, so there we were on the phone with Aaron getting him to Google a comparative analysis of rodent droppings, and he's describing the various kinds of shit to us, leading us to conclude that our pests are mice.

Despite the yuck factor today, I would say that all in all we had a good four days of work while John's crew was off. We got done what we wanted to so they can dig in first thing tomorrow with the next round of demolition.