Guess what I did today . . .

For those of you who have never been to our home, here’s what the outside of our little townhouse looks like. It’s cute, quaint, lacking in storage, getting a bit small for our family, but a comfortable home nonetheless. One of these days when the house is clean I’ll post pics of what it looks like on the inside.

Oh, what’s all that stuff on the lawn, you ask?

Garage sale? End-of-summer cleaning?
I wish.

Allow me to introduce you to our friend Chip.

Cute, huh? Chip has been a very naughty boy. Chip decided he would help himself to our garage, and swipe some of our insulation, wood, and strings of our mop to take back to his crib.

See the jagged edges of that wood? That’s supposed to go all the way down.

Oh, and yup. That wood is supposed to go all the way down, too. The little bugger chewed through the side of our garage. That gray powdery stuff is what we used to make Chip go away. Being the humane people we are, we went with an organic powder that uses a mix of garlic oil and some kind of animal urine to deter the little rodent. Garlic. And urine. You can imagine how lovely our garage is smelling. How did this happen, you ask?

Let me show you. This is our front walk. Pretty flowers there on the side of the garage, eh?

Well, behind these pretty flowers is a short concrete wall over which our garage siding hangs about an inch or so. Our friend Chip weaseled his way up under the siding at this very spot (if you move those flowers out of the way there’s a nice little pile of wood shavings and insulation as evidence) and chewed his way into the garage.

I used to think chipmunks were cute. That is, until I had to spend two hours disinfecting the garage floor that our furry friend Chip had very rudely pooped all over.

Here’s my hero hubby taking care of the problem once and for all. While the garlic and urine smell has deterred Chip for the past week or two, chances are pretty good that he’ll be back. So, we stuffed some steel wool into the holes he made, and covered them with metal sheeting.

Try chewing through that, Chip.

The silver lining is that I really needed to go through our stuff in the garage anyway, so it was a good opportunity to weed some things out. I would have done it anyhow, but now the garage is on its way to being REALLY clean.

Stupid chipmunks.

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