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Pros and Cons of the Best Mouse Traps (Plus Baiting Tips)

If there is one problem every homeowner and renter will likely encounter at some point, it is spotting a mouse in the house. One study has suggested that almost 15 million people have spotted rodents in their houses in the last year alone (~12% of occupied housing units!), which suggests that, given enough time, this problem will be experienced by everyone no matter the house size, location, age, and more.

We are no strangers to seeing a mouse in our house. This typically happens in the winter every year when mice look for warmer residences, and our 100+ year-old house has no shortage of openings that a mouse could crawl into.

As such, whenever we see signs of having a mouse, we turn to our trusty assortment of mouse traps to begin the eviction process. So in this one, we thought we'd share the pros and cons of some mouse traps we've tried, share what works best, some downsides you may not think about, and explain why baiting a trap is an absolute must.

If you know someone who's into homesteading, we've got the perfect gift guide for you. Whether your gift recipient is into gardening, canning, preserving, fermenting, or other weird DIY hobbies, we've got ideas for every niche.

As we are into these hobbies ourselves, we can easily say we would be super excited if any of these things showed up as a gift (even though we already own 99% of them!).

In this one, we thought we'd approach our gift guide a little differently and instead of organizing by product, we organize this one by recipient interests (e.g. gardener gifts, baker gifts, etc.)!

We have been planning a complete kitchen renovation for far longer than I'd like to admit.

First, we delayed our project because of financial issues (there are a lot of zeroes involved with a kitchen renovation). Then we delayed our project due to COVID. By the time we finally got around to pulling the trigger to start our renovation, we felt like we had a very good idea of everything we wanted. Those extra years gave us a ton of time to think about it (and save for it!), after all.

But we had this nagging feeling that we could still do better. That we were, perhaps, missing some glaringly obvious issues or that a contractor would not fully understand our vision and something would get lost in translation from what is in our heads to the final delivered product or layout. We have seen this repeatedly at friends' houses, and we did not want to make a mistake simply from not knowing any better.

So we decided to hire a kitchen designer for added peace of mind and, in particular, get contractor-ready drawings for our project at large.

As it turns out, we loved having our designer, and when it comes to looking at whether or not they were worth the fee, we thought we'd share some of the things you'll likely get out of your partnership!

When we decided to start a kitchen remodel, we knew we would finance our appliances in some capacity.

We could make up many reasons why that was the case, but the simple answer was that the appliances we wanted were expensive (read: ~$25,000 in total) and we didn't want to blow through our cash savings to buy these outright.

So when it came to looking into financing, we considered the spread of options be it putting them on a credit card, taking out a home equity line of credit (HELOC), and 12-month, no-interest financing from the sellers.

Ultimately we went with the zero-interest financing from the retailers because 0% interest sounded pretty good to us. But this comes with one big caveat that is often not discussed but really needs to be addressed- that “12-month term” is disingenuous at best!

Note: We are not financial planners. This article is more about conveying our experience in taking 12 months same as cash financing and is purely anecdotal. Your mileage may vary. When in doubt talk to a financial planner before making any major purchase decisions.

We founded Hipster Homesteaders in late 2021 to chronicle our somewhat different approach to urban homesteading on our ~0.13 acre lot in Pittsburgh.

Our goal here is not to be 100% self-reliant on food grown in our yard, but rather to maximize our urban gardening as best we can while supplementing it with local produce (via CSAs), local meats (via area farmers), and cutting out intermediaries when supporting other non-local businesses (such as buying seafood direct from fishermen in Alaska over factory farmed products in the grocery store).

Now that we are winding down our first proper season after launching this site, we thought we'd review everything we have added to our homestead in the past year!

We are quite fortunate to have a south-facing deck that is large enough to allow us to container garden in the summer and fall. Every year we put out many pots of tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and other items to enjoy the bounty of our prized deck.

In a recent season, however, we had a problem. A big problem in the form of a cute raccoon that decided to call our deck home and eat everything in sight. As it turned out, grease from our smoker had dripped onto the decking and attracted a raccoon, but the plentiful tasty fruits and vegetables caused it to stick around.

It came back again and again and again and virtually ruined our entire season.

After trying many raccoon repellants, we quickly learned that most did not work for our scenario. But after trial and error, we found one that worked. So in this one, we wanted to share what we tried, share why some items didn't work, and discuss why spike strips were our answer.

Raise your hand if you are mildly addicted to sparkling water.

This was us at the beginning of the COVID pandemic when we found our consumption of sparkling water increasing to record proportions (often to the tune of four or five boxes a week). So when we realized just how much money this was costing us, we thought there had to be a better way.

Enter the Aarke sparkling water maker, and after just a few minutes of research, we knew acquiring one of these seltzer makers would really be a game-changer for our consumption.

But the real question to us after the fact was not “how good is the machine?” (we love it), but whether or not it was actually a worthy investment to begin with. So we did some math to see what the payback period would be for different scenarios!

Three of the main reasons we purchased our house is that it is south facing, gets a ton of natural light, and has an exceptional skyline view (check out our Pittsburgh webcam view here)!

For the longest time, we simply did not have any blinds on our windows because we loved having the view and all that light come in. But after a while, especially in the summer months, the early wakeups due to the sunrise became old- we simply wanted to start sleeping in more.

So when we decided to get customized curtains for our bedroom, we decided to go for the motorized blinds and drapes route. We ended up purchasing electric curtains from Graywind as the price increase was not as much as we would've otherwise expected for motorized blinds versus conventional custom blinds. Now that we've had both electric drapes and curtains for several months, we thought we'd share a bit about what they are like in this review!

Note: Photos in this review were taken during the day as nighttime photos are impractical because, well, our room is so dark! As such, it is worth noting again that our house is south facing and our rooms can get exceptionally bright, so when we talk about breakthrough light keep in mind that we are on an extreme end here.

Pros and Cons of the Best Mouse Traps (Plus Baiting Tips)

The Best Gifts for Homesteaders, Gardeners, and Cooks

5 Reasons a Kitchen Designer May Be Worth The Price

The Danger of 12 Months No Interest Financing for Appliances

Hipster Homesteaders Year One in Review – Getting Started

5 Raccoon Repellants that Didn’t Work (and One That Did)

How Long Until a Sparkling Water Maker Pays Itself Off?

Graywind Motorized Curtains Review – Game Changer for Sleep