Wooden House Up North

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As the weather gets cold before winter, mice come in from the fields to look for warm locations. This is normal for any wooden rural house. Mice get into the attic and ceiling spaces and can cause a problem if they chew on items, especially electric cabling. They also cause tunnels through the insulation that can make the house lose heat faster especially when windy.

Preventing their access into a 1940's wooden house is difficult. This year we tried to prevent mouse access by using copper wire-wool and special musband metal strips, that still allow ventilation of the siding without permitting access. Normally however this musband must go on before the siding, and we were only able to fit them to one side of the house due to where the wooden fixing points for the metal siding are located. The metal siding sheets run almost the entire height of the house - they aren't an easy Sunday afternoon job to remove and replace. There also isnt a concrete covering on the basement insulation outer, and so creating a good transition between the basement and the metal siding is currently difficult.

Fixing all this will mean facing the basement insulation and toping it off with a metal plate, which itself is anchored to the house. Ideally we would then take all the metal siding and insulation off the house and re-lay the "skin" of the house to seal any ancient hole they have found or created. That later task is a nightmare - it would be an expensive job needing multiple people and safe-working-at-height machinery. It would also be disproportionate to the value of the house. But if we wont the lottery, that is what the solution would be.

In the meantime, we have to keep the mice that gain access under control. I use a webcam in the attic to send me a message when it sees movement, and I have traps underneath the camera that it can view. This way if I use humane traps I can see when a mouse is trapped, and take the mouse to release it far away. If I have to use deadly traps, I can see when a trap is triggered and go to clean and reset it.

Trapping mice is also imperfect - typically our humane (live-capture) traps get ignored by the mice, and the deadly traps are not always fatal. Last year the fatal traps killed 9 mice and injured 1, with the live capture trap capturing 1 mouse. The mouse in the photo was our first mouse of this year as the temperature outside starts to get colder. Sadly, instead of killing it instantly, the trap has broken its rear leg and left it in pain. I had to kill it so that it didn't suffer further as releasing it would just cause it suffer move and starve or go hypothermic. I replaced the trap with two live-capture traps and then watched on the web-cam as a second mouse ran all over the capture traps and refused to go inside. I dont like using the deadly traps but our experience last year was that they are far more effective.