Rodents!

Well not a long time after we excluded the bats and as it was starting to get cool out one night after we had moved up to the upstairs bedroom we heard scratching in the wall. It was not really a mouse sounding noise so we thought perhaps there was a bat stuck in someplace that was trying to get out. Well not much we could do about it that night so we decided to tackle figuring it out the next day in the light of the day. Well the next day when I got home from work Greg said I think we have a bat in the furnace! WHAT! A bat-how did that get in there? So we went downstairs and there were little scraping scratching noises coming from the furnace. So we proceeded to try to figure out which side of the hepa filter side it was on. Had it come in from the outside through the venting pipes or somehow been in the house and got down one of the returns. As we were trying to figure out how we might extract this animal I said you don't think it could be a mouse do you? Greg said I don't know how but maybe. So we decided to brave it and we figured out by the noises it had gotten in on the house side so it had come down a return somehow. It had to be from the second floor since I had put screening over all the first floor returns to prevent any items from falling in them and getting into the new heating system. Anyone who is familiar with old house will realize that most runs and returns in old house have large hole grating that most anyting can fall into. So Greg and I suited up with gloves, safety glasses and garbage bags to hopefully somehow get what we were still sure was a bat in the furnace. We headed back down and started to take apart our filter system as I started to pull open the first tray of the prefilter I could see a little nose and whiskers poking out. A MOUSE!!! Well better than a bat I guess. So I carefully pulled out the filter and we tried to grab the little bugger. Well of course he was much faster than the two of us so off he scampered across the basement floor. We were relieved but now we had a whole different problem Not bats but a different rodent-mice. Traps were set and in a few days we had the little invader. Greg set about to try to figure out were he had gotten in and we realized what had happened. He had gotten in upstairs and ran along the rafters in the floor or along the baseboard and gotten to the upstairs air return. Down he went on the ride of his life down to the filter assembly in the furnace until we got him out. So needless to say there are now screens over all the house returns and we have been mouse free since then. And if it isn't one fuzzy mammal it is another-flying or scampering neither belong in our house!