Fair warning: This post deals with poisoning unwanted vermin.

The tiny house sits on a platform. The crew dug down 8″, edged the area with two 4x4s stacked on top of each other, and then filled the rest with rocks. The platform wasn’t completely level, and so the tiny house actually sits on skinny concrete bricks on three corners of the house.

This means that there was an inch or so gap running around three sides of the house.

This summer, for the first time, I got critters living underneath the house. I couldn’t hear them, but my cat sure could.

The turn-off valve for the water for the tiny house is actually underneath the floor of the house itself, under the sink. I had the cabinet built so that I could pull out the drawer that’s underneath the sink, then pull out a sliding board and access the area.

(The reason is because we get snow up here sometimes. And we’re not always around during Christmas when there’s snow. Don’t want the pipes to freeze inside the tiny house, so if we’re going to be traveling and it’s going to get cold, I just shut off the water to the house.)

So I put poison pelts under the house near the cutoff valve, as well as bought bags of pea gravel to cover up the gaps. I ran out of gravel before I closed off all the gaps. I concentrated on the back of the house, as well as the side closest to the bird feeder. (Birds are messy eaters, ya know.) Plus, I spread a deer-rat-rabbit-critter repellent all around the base of the house. It’s primarily made out of dried blood, and supposedly won’t bother the birds.

That seemed to do the trick. Kitty stopped acting as though there was something under the floor, and fortunately for me, nothing died under there.

I bought more pea gravel to fill in the rest of the gap. Then I injured my knee and wasn’t about to be hauling around 50 lb. bags of rocks.

Yesterday morning, about 5:50, a thumping noise woke me up. I was sleeping in the tiny house, kitty was over at the main house. Had a weird thought of zombies knocking on the door.

Finally figured out that there was a critter under the floor, banging at something. No idea what.

Fortunately, the weather has stayed beautiful and my knee is a lot better. I closed off the last gap of the house, spread more of the repellent, then was about to go check under the house.

I ended up being distracted by something and opening up the cupboard above the sink.

There, very carefully arranged on the shelf, I found little gnawed on poison pellets.

I have hot and cold water pipes that run from the water heater and back into the wall. When we cut the sheet rock, we left about an inch gap at the bottom of the pipes.

Seemed that the critter had been under the house, then climbed the pipes between the walls, come out the hole in the sheetrock around the pipe, and carefully deposited the pellets, probably saving them for later.

This was when I figured out it was a mouse, as there was also mouse poop on the shelf.

When I checked, all of the pellets that had been under the house were now gone.

So I cleaned up everything, put out more pellets, spread more repellent, and hope that takes care of the problem for now.