It was no surprise that the laundry room left much to be desired. Outdoor; no door; rock wall. From the cushy, heated, upstairs laundry room with a hanger bar and a folding table, I was more worried about this change, than many of the other changes in this house. I’m not one of those people who gets her laundry done on time, so it was not uncommon for someone to be sorting through the dryer or a nearby laundry basket, half dressed looking for a complementary piece of clothing.
So how we were going to accomplish this in the middle of winter… was something I was not looking forward to learning. Our home inspector had another fun discovery for us right off the bat… or should I say the discovery WAS BATS. Two cute little bats, hanging from the ceiling, barely noticeable, luckily, with a home full of boys, this was more of a really cool development, than anything to be scared of. But nonetheless, probably not something we want frequently in our laundry room.
And here’s a cool little fact: bats are a federally protected species. So I was googling all kinds of way to encourage bats to bed-down somewhere else. I guess you can buy/build a bad house… then plant special flowers around it. All fascinating… but it turns out, once we moved in, we only saw them once or twice again, and then they decided we were not the neighbors they wanted, and found a new home on their own.
The laundry room residents who did NOT get the memo; however, were the mice .. or the rats. Given the site of the droppings, I am wondering if maybe it was a mixture of both? Nonetheless, those little creatures are NOT federally protected, so we considered 4 options to get those little buggers out of our space:
- Rodent Bait: We have little littles around, and a dog who probably would try to eat a dead rodent if she found one, I didn’t want to use any type of bait.
- Life Mouse Traps: We actually had bought and attempted to use many of these at our suburban house after we found massive droppings in our backyard. But noneofthem work, seems like this generation of rodents was too smart for those silly things. Or we were doing something wrong, regardless, what would we do after we caught them out here? Bring them to the back of the property? Nah, rodent reduction is what we need.
- Regular ole Mouse Traps: Ok, yes, maybe. I’m just not a fan of seeing and/or disposing of a dead mouse… or our dog would snap herself or a kid would snap himself….. too many issues. And those sticky ones just don’t seem humane to me.
- Barn Cats: Yes! Cute kitties and reduction in our rodents? Double win. This is the route we went. I’ll fill you more in on how that went in my next post.