It's been a while since we've been to the house in Wisconsin, so we took a dash down to peek at the work being done and do a couple chores.

The repair crews have been at the electric and walls in the basement for a little while now. The questionable overhead lights have been removed, and new recessed lighting fixtures have been installed. The crew doing the drywall is still working. They've got all the bits in place, but are reworking some of the joints as they found some lacking quality under intense lighting. They're hoping to be done before the end of next week, and then on to painting. After painting, the lights can be installed, and then the flooring follows. Poof...in January or February, done!

It snowed a week or so ago, so I took some time to push the snow off the concrete platform outside the garage door. The work trucks and general weather have kept the snow rutted and shallow on the drive into the yard. A small silver lining to having people working on your house is that it looks like someone is at your house.

In addition to all that, I reset the mouse traps. All four of the Tomcat bait holders had either been mostly or completely depleted, so hopefully that leads to a lot of dead mice. All four of the Victor electronic mouse traps had tripped, but only two had mice in them The two without mice had been cleaned of the peanut butter smear of bait, so I'd guess something got zapped enough to disarm the trap, and the bait was taken after. The two with mice had plenty of bait remaining, because the mouse carcass gets in the way of the next mouse.

One of the electronic traps is actually a multi-mouse trap, which I can't recommend. Since we're not there to clear a trap immediately when they're tripped, I thought to try the "up to 10 mice" trap. It's kind of the same zapper as the other, but in a motorized tunnel that is supposed to flip over and dump the carcass into a little drawer and return for the next mouse. It's caught two mice, and been tripped twice without catching any mice, but neither caught mice fell into the trap, making it a really expensive version of the other trap. Further, because the mouse was stuck in the electrodes, the batteries drained, and I don't have any more on hand, so it probably won't work for the next mouse. This takes 4xC batteries, which are weirdly difficult to find near the house (I'll have to remember to bring more when visiting next) when it should really just have a wall outlet option. Maybe it was low on battery power and that's why it didn't dump the caught mouse. I put it in the garage, where it'll probably either shock one mouse or give away a smear of peanut butter.

The Victor electronic mouse traps are a  hit, and I recommend them. I have two in my basement (used to have one in the kitchen), but we haven't had a mouse in months (knock on wood). I have one in the crawlspace opening, watched by a Ring camera, and I've had stretches of a mouse nearly every day. I've also nabbed a few in the other one, which is at the foot of the basement stairs (so one can see the light just by looking down at it). I think they're a little less functional at the Wisconsin house just because of the delay between capture and cleaning.

I also have a Flip N Slide bucket trap at the Wisconsin house. I started with it in the garage, but it caught a couple inches worth of mice! I moved it into the house, first in the basement (where it caught a solid layer of mice, maybe about 10), and now on the main floor (since they're working on the rooms in the basement). This last time it didn't capture any mice. I usually put a little MouseX in there, to attract mice with its birdseed-like smell (well, to me), and to more quickly kill them when they're in the trap (eating their rewards). Clearly from the volume I caught in the garage, where there were layers of mice over the bait, it worked. This time I addedd the extra Tomcat bait from the traps when I refilled them, and set the bucket in a different spot in the same room.

I have cameras pointed at the traps in the Wisconsin house, too, but unlike the camera at my house, I've not caught one mouse going into a trap in Wisconsin. I can see the light indicating the trap has triggered, and in at least one case, the camera can see into the tunnel on the trap, so it's possible to see a caught mouse.

At home we use cookies as bait, at least a little bit of one. A bit of the end of a chocolate Italian wafer seems to be a favorite. I've also used peanut butter smears, peanuts, other nuts, other nut butters, birdseed, and other cookies. They've all had some success, but the Italian wafers seem to be the best. They've got a nice waft, I guess, and the mice spend a bit of time trying to get in the mesh end of the trap before succumbing to entering the trap tunnel.

If there was one thing I'd change about the Victor traps, it'd be the baiting. The "mesh" at the end is a number of holes drilled through one end of the trap. Inside are metal plates, going almost right up to the end. There's a little cup right between the plate and mesh where you're supposed to put the bait, but it's a tricky angle to get anything like peanut butter in there, and it doesn't really hold anything else, like nuts or seeds. I usually smear peanut butter on the side of the bait, at that end of the tunnel, instead. With the cookies, I just let it rest deep in the trap, possibly on the plate or against the mesh (it's easy to set in there, but hard to be sure it hasn't moved while placing the trap). It'd be great if there was maybe a little sleeve or bigger pocket in there so one could be sure the bait isn't something the mouse can reach through the mesh (they stick their noses and little hands in there to try), and that they couldn't remove if they safely navigated the tunnel (the camera caught at least one mouse survive the zapping and take the cookie as its reward). Still, it works, so baiting it is a pretty small thing.

I've gone on a bit much about mouse hunting.

We bantered a bit about what to do with the house after the repairs are complete. We plan to sell the house, staging it with the furniture we can't use, possibly offering it with the house. There's still plenty of stuff there to take away, and the house has sat empty for the better part of two years, so the dust dragons are winning. We want to hire a solid crew to come and clean all the bits. We were poking at the gas fireplace (and the half dozen bat carcasses behind its glass),  but we're not sure if it works (and didn't want to fire it up with bats in it), so we need to get someone out to assess and possibly repair that.

I did get permission to add robot vacuums to the house, to try to help keep any animal trails and dust from building up between visits. I'm leaning toward one of the Shark robots. We've got a bagless handheld vacuum of theirs and it works great. It's also got great reviews, don't seem too obnoxious or expensive, and they seem to work well with different floors (carpet, wood, tile) and thresholds. And some (surely the ones we'd get) work with remote control apps, so we can further keep aware of what's going on in the house.

Heh...shopping for robots!