The Saga of a Missing Mousetrap and Deconstruction

So, early yesterday morning, Hubs and I were sitting in the office when we heard the telltale snap of a mouse getting thwacked in a trap out in the garage.  Once he'd had his coffee and had sufficiently woken up to start the days chores, he went out there.

No mouse.  No trap.

The hunt began.

The mouse, with trap attached, had gotten up under the wooden deck/ramp thingie out in the garage.  With no way to reach it, we kind of shrugged and decided to tackle it later.  It wasn't going anywhere.

After lunch, Hubs decided to take the deck/ramp thingie apart.  I mean, we've been here five and a half years and have never seen what's under there anyway, so it was a worthy project, even if there wasn't a mouse who was going to stink up the place eventually.

So, he went to work pulling up boards and sheets of particle board.  We found a bunch of Max's missing kitty toys under the ramp part.  But no mouse.  Under the deck part, we found more kitty toys and the original wooden step from the house into the garage.  But no mouse.

And no holes for it to have escaped into the walls of the garage.

And no trap, so it was still dragging that damn thing.

We searched everywhere.  Not under the jeep.  No under the boat.  Not under the work bench, in the bathroom, behind the tools, beneath the mower...

Beside the deck/ramp thingie is a wooden platform.  It has slats with holes that things fall through to land beneath.  (Don't look at me, I didn't make the damn thing.  Hubs didn't either.)  I shined a flashlight through the holes and lit on the trap.  Gnarly.  Didn't see the mouse, though, so it was all good.

Except once started, Hubs wanted to finish the project and get it all cleaned underneath that thing, too.  More pried boards.  OMG, the loads of dust, junk, and mouse poop underneath it all.  :gag:  And the trap.  With the mouse still attached.

Near as we can figure it, the mouse, having realized it had no way to escape underneath the deck/ramp thingie, had ventured back out into the garage, climbed the platform and fallen through the slats.

Hubs dispatched the mouse and cleaned up all the gunk and detritus from however many years that thing had been there (at least 6 years - just before we moved here - but no more than 17, when the garage was added on).  Wearing a filter mask, so he didn't breathe mouse poop dust.  (He didn't want me even out there during this, and I was OK with that.)

By then, it was dinner time, so he put it back together just enough so neither of us would kill ourselves stepping into the garage, and left the rest of it for today.  Yeah, four hours worth of it*.

Today, Hubs will put it all back together with additional wood to block the holes the mouse originally used to get up underneath there.

Ah, life in the wilds of SWMO.

*Hubs spent four hours on it.  I was in the living room reading and watching reruns of House and Criminal Minds.