Stupidity and MiceIt's not the mice that are stupid. Well, they're not very bright, I know that, poor little buggers. I like them. I just don't like them in my home, something I posted about back before Christmas. Well, we had a new mouse adventure recently, one that ended with me wishing ill fortune to the complete fucking idiots who gut rehabbed our building back in 1999 or so, a few years before we bought our condo. Yep. They're the stupid ones, not mus musculus in general.
But let me not get ahead of myself. *clears throat*
One of the two mice we saw at the very beginning of the incursion escaped from Carter and ducked, we figured, into a small space between one side of our refrigerator and the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. We shone a flashlight in there, and saw what appeared to be the spot where he/she/they probably got into our place. So we figured we'd get the fridge out of the very small alcove it's been in for the past 22 or so years, then mouse-proof that area, either with steel wool or the fast-expanding, fast-hardening foam that works very well as a barricade against mice, possibly both. Not quite easy-peasy but fairly straightforward.
Ha. And I repeat, ha.
Tonight, Bob and I are recovering from hauling the fridge out of that alcove in order to do the proofing. We manhandled and half-inched the fridge out and viewed what no one has seen for decades. I knew it was going to be horrid back there, and it certainly was. But you know what made me want to hunt down the "rehabbers" (yes, they're snicker quotes, why do you ask?) and harm them?
The fact that they didn't think it was necessary to put baseboards behind the fridge.
There. were. no. baseboards.
What there were lots of were holes and cracks in the walls down near the floor (which was also exceedingly badly laid, we discovered, so there's that as well). I told BB we were lucky that we hadn't been snowed under by mice years ago. We put down the anti-mouse foam around where there should have been baseboards, and I did as much cleanup as I could stand while the foam hardened. I cleared out some gunk that might have been interfering with an air intake section of the fridge. Then I manhandled the fridge back into place and put the kitchen back to rights.
We've probably effectively mouse-proofed the kitchen (or at least I most devoutly hope so) and I suppose we can consider that a win.
But no baseboards. No. Fucking. Baseboards. Those guys deserve to be peed on by many, many, many mice. I certainly hope our mice can be aimed at them. Idiots.