A Mouse Tried to Kill Our Toilet

I arrived on the island late at night to discover a large amount of land had been leveled. It was hard to tell exactly what had taken place, and the little flashlight that I borrowed from Jules and Ian just couldn't shed enough light on the yard for me to see what had happened.

Actually I stopped a Jules and Ian's on the way by, and talked with Jules' Mom and Dad for a few hours, so it was pretty late and pretty dark when I finally got to out place.

I got up well before the coffee shop opened and had a wander around the yard to find all 6 stumps had been pulled, the area where the addition will go had been leveled and the area for the water tanks had been leveled. There was also a big pile of sand for me to move to build a platform for our water storage tanks.

Wayne was set to come over at 3PM to finish our skylight and chimney flashing so I had the morning to build the water storage platform. I started by framing in a 8x16 sandbox with 2x6's. Apparently 6 inches is all the sand you need to make a solid, level platform for the tanks. Once the frame was built I wheeled over what seemed like 400 wheelbarrow loads to fill it. Jim, the water tank guy, came by and put his stamp of approval on it and is set to deliver the two tanks when we're there for the "2-4" weekend.

Wayne arrived right on schedule and while he did the flashing, I installed the last remaining roofing panels. I still have some "gable end" flashing to put up when I get a chance, and all the gutters, but our roof is now completely covered and our house dry.

Oh ya... The mouse... So our composting toilet has 2 fans. One blows air into the holding chamber and the other blows the stinky air out the stack. I noticed the last time I was up that only 1 fan was working but ran out of time to deal with it.

This weekend when I turned the fans on, again only 1 started up and after an hour or two the whole house smelled like sewage. The time had come for me to deal with the situation, so I took the cover panel off of the box that holds the fans and electronics and discovered that a mouse wedged into the fan blades! I guess it got in through the small gap in the seat and once in the bowl, he couldn't get out. Apparently he made a run for it through the fan, but wasn't quick enough and the fan blades got him. It was pretty gross, but I got him out and the bad smells are now traveling up through the stack as they should and our place now smells like fresh lumber like it should.