clever husband

building a better mouse trap?

On June 18, 2010, in NY stories, by Lori

If you live in the south, you have bugs. Roaches. You just do, and you know it. If you live in Manhattan, you have to deal with mice and you have to see rats scurrying around in the subway, or even hurrying down the sidewalk. You just do. It’s gross, but it’s just the way it is.

Our building was built in 1900. It has incredibly high ceilings – so high that most people (including us) have dropped them down a bit. That leaves a pretty large gap between the floors. For the last week or so, we’ve been hearing something running around, scratching scratching digging, right above our ceiling….which means it’s in the space between floors, trapped. No idea how it got in the space, maybe the upstairs neighbors have some kind of hole in their floor or something, but there it is. This has happened before, but the thing died, and it was hot, and the thing (and therefore our entire apartment) reeked. It was awful, gag-inducing, rotting animal. It lingered in the corners long after the full smell faded away.

So we didn’t want THAT to happen again. But what to do. It’s been crawling around up there for so many days, the scratching has been getting weaker, and we hear it less often. Finally, this afternoon, my darling husband took action. The coat closet in the living room has a ceiling that goes up to the very next floor, higher than the dropped ceiling. So he sawed open a hole large enough for a mouse to emerge, and taped a piece of paper next to the hole with a big schmear of peanut butter, to lure it toward the hole. We’ll leave the closet light on, to illuminate the hole – easily seen in the darkness, we hope. But would the mouse just leap out of the hole into space? Probably not. So my clever husband made a little ramp for it to run down, using a wooden yardstick.