I think sometime over the pandemic when we were all really, really stuck at home, Vince made us watch this video. We had made a habit of piling into bed together at about 9 pm and proposing youtube videos to each other. It’s not easy to find videos we all agree on, but somehow we agreed to watch 11 raccoons on a porch.
So we’ve been hearing scurrying in our attic for a little while now. It was once in a while for a bit, but then in the past week, the scurrying evolved into steady chewing right above our heads from 3 am – 5 am. We first fled to the guest room and Jeremy (who has more sensitive ears than I do) could still hear it. Then we turned on some white noise (babbling brook) which does drown out the chewing, but the first night was too loud, so while I did fall asleep to the brook, I woke up and then it was too loud for me to fall back asleep and I felt like I was in a forest and I’m never really comfortable sleeping/camping. Jeremy, on the other hand, woke up and thought the house was flooding or that it was an enormous rain event. We eventually just settled on low volume plain old white (or brown) noise -> it comes in different colors. While we were trying to rescue our sleep, I did both 1) make an appointment with an exterminator and 2) made Jeremy go up into the attic and see if he could see anything. Honestly, I thought it was going to look like this:
But he saw nothing but a sea of blown insulation and the exterminator was not available for 4-5 days, so we settled into brown noise slumber – which is actually pretty nice and might be implemented full time even after the animal infestation is gone.
The exterminator came yesterday, went up into the attic and within three seconds was showing us the holes that the mice made to burrow into the insulation and the little trails running atop the blown insulation like criss crossing freeways through the plains of the Midwest. So we have mice. But, hopefully, we won’t have mice for much longer.