Today I managed to kill a mouse which had infiltrated one of my kitchen drawers. I am about 87% sure he is a lone ranger, separate from the family of mice who hang around our compost bin.

This once was not so. A few months ago had seen a fairly respectable mouse problem, at least as far as a little house on a main street with no particular fields in the vicinity goes. Heck, it was probably a light mouse problem, but a mouse problem it still was.

We eventually killed them with good ol’ fashioned persistence and devoted use of the basic snap trap, and except for the aforementioned lone ranger they have kept to the outdoors.

The delightful part, however, was cleaning up. They poop and pee and all that good stuff and there is something so disturbing about all those little bits of poop that just give me the shudders. What horrible residue did I leave behind?

Here is one of my kitchen drawers:

My husband left a bag of sunflower seeds in there, as you can see.

I had to tackle these drawers.

I took out all the appropriate trash and dumped the appropriate remainders in the compost bin, figuring mouse dropping have to be good for something. Using tissue and eventually cotton swabs and even toothpicks, I knocked every last bit of not-drawer out of there.

Next I made a cleaning solution of 1 part warm water, 1 part apple cider vinegar, with a few drops of peppermint oil (apparently mice hate it) and wiped it all down. While I was of course not interested in damaging the wood, I did want my solution to soak in just enough to make myself feel better about mice-ness. I wiped the solution in rather than pour in order to protect the wood. I gave it a few minutes. Once I was comfortable, I wiped it out again with a dry cloth and set it out in the sun to dry.

I’m not sure if my sun exposure was enough to really kill any bacteria nor do I particularly care, but sun drying stuff always makes me feel better.

In the end, hooray, a drawer I dare put things in again: