One evening, about a week ago, Bootstrap was sitting on one of the pianos staring up at the ceiling. This isn’t normal behavior for him, but we didn’t really pursue it. A few evenings later Sibylle was working at the table in the studio when Bootstrap became interesting in the corner of the room there. She could hear faint scrabbling sounds from the wall.
Uh oh.
This morning I observed him very intently stalking the bottom step of the stairs. I went and stood behind him and I could hear the scrabbling sound too.
Crap.
We’ve got mice.
It is entirely possible that we moved a mouse with us from the Frey Street house as there was evidence of mice in that garage, which was full of boxes. Boxes which are now in our unfinished basement. It is also possible that we got mice along with the house. The area was only recently developed and still has large fields that are likely teeming with critters.
Sibylle did some reading on what approaches work best and we bought some spring traps today. If we are still catching mice a few days from now it means there’s some sort of access for them into the house. At that point we’ll call the pest control people. Until then I’ll put three or four traps in the garage and the rest in the unfinished portion of the basement to see what I catch.
Hopefully we can eliminate this problem quickly and with out too much trouble.