In the middle of the morning, around 4 am or so, I heard this loud scratching sounds. Fearful that our youngest son somehow got up and was getting into trouble, I headed downstairs, half asleep. When I got down, I found my husband with a flashlight and his head cocked to one side.
The scratching started up again. “Is it a mouse?” I asked and he shushed me. I complained under my breath about our less than stellar extermination company; the one that failed to show up for the last two appointments.
My husband opened the garage door and started tip-toeing in to take a peek. The scratching started up again. It was more like a loud scrambling. “It is coming from the basement,” I said.
After some investigating, he said, “Actually, I think it is stuck in the wall. It must have gotten in through the hole in the garage that the guy put there when he backed in to the drywall (the previous owner), and it can’t get out.
Immediately, I thought of our stockpile of food in the basement. “Is it going to get our cereal?” At nearly $5 for a box that lasts less than a day in our house, I had my priorities in order.
“No, it would have to chew through a lot of wood to get through,” he said. Okay, so maybe large holes in the walls and chewed up electrical wires would be worse.
“Can’t we scare it back the way it came?” Since the thing was scratching and presumably chewing the whole time that we were talking and shining lights on and off, the possibility of it was admittedly small. Still, my husband wanted to humor me. He got a wooden stick and started banging the wall of the basement, on the stairs, on the other side of the garage. Bang bang bang. He waited. Silence. Bang Bang. Silence. After shining the flashlight back into the garage to see if the mouse escaped, my husband sat on the family room couch and waited. He made himself comfortable and I shot him an indignant look. Wasn’t he going to DO something about the mouse?
Check back later to see what happened next!
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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