Owning a house comes with responsibilities. You are fully responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the home. Along with the upkeep of the home, you also have to maintain the surrounding area such as the lawn or in my case the lawn and barn. This has been a quite an interesting year in home ownership as I was never the handy man in my family.
So I am not that handy, but I have YouTube and the rest of the internet to help me, right? Well sort of. The internet is handy for instructions when it comes to certain models of equipment or even interesting ideas for projects or how to instructions. What the Internet does not tell you is on the fly topics.
A notable topic the Internet does not cover is how to find a dead mouse that is smelling up your house, especially when it is in your vents during the colder months. We have an older house so I expected a few mice to get in during the colder months. One had gotten in and had died in our vents in the living room. Fortunately, I was able to find it and remove it before it got too bad.
The second time it had happened, the smell was being pumped upstairs into our bedrooms. All of the vents run straight up the interior of our walls up to the upstairs so I did not have to worry about tearing apart any portion of the wall to get to the vents. My troubles was that the vents hugged the ceiling of the basement before they shoot up and are very difficult to disassemble.
It took me 2 afternoons to disassemble the vents that went upstairs to try to find the correct one. I can proudly say that I now know how to disassemble and reassemble those vents in case I would ever have to do any work with them. After searching those 2 afternoons, another room started to smell so I figured out that it had to be coming from the furnace. I pulled out the furnace filter and the mouse had chewed a hole through the filter and choked to death right on the other side.
Sometimes you just have to learn by doing and taking things apart rather than relying on the internet for answers. No one could have told me exactly where the mouse would have been. Recently, we just had an O-Ring go bad in our kitchen sink and there was a small puddle at my feet while doing dishes. Luckily, it was easy to take apart and fix.
Got any stories where you had to do something by yourself instead of looking it up on the internet? Let me know in the comments.
