Lookout House struggles with mice

KATELYN CLEMENT

kmclement16@ole.augie.edu

Signing up for a theme house sounds like a lot of fun and a way for students to give back to the community. However, the students living in Lookout House are paying more than what they bargained for. Since the students moved in two years ago, they have been overrun by mice.

The signs of a mouse infestation appeared soon after they moved in. Now they hear scurrying and scratching in the walls of the house while they sleep. The mice pop out of nowhere and run across the floor while the disgusted students are cooking or doing homework.

Shi Almont, one of the residents of Lookout, said, “We hear them in the trash cans under the sink sometimes. Also, a couple weeks ago, my roommate had banana bread sitting on her nightstand in her room. She woke up in the morning to find it laying on the ground with a hole chewed through it.”

Katelyn Derby also expressed her distress about the rampaging mice. Derby said, “We’ve had clear evidence of mice in our house for months with no real improvement,” Derby said. “It makes it difficult at night knowing that there are little rodents crawling around when you sleep.”

The students contacted Campus Life about the situation, but, Almont said, Campus Life set up numerous traps to no avail. The mice still roam the house.

“The mice have lived in Lookout much longer than we have—the house belongs to them now.”

Mice are not the only problem that they have had to endure.

Almont said that when they first moved into the house there was a gaping hole in the basement’s bathroom wall.

Almont had contacted Campus Life and it patched the hole, but a few days later an oppressive odor developed.

Maintenance opened the hole back up only to find numerous dead rabbits trapped inside—the suspects who chewed the hole in the first place.

Maintenance fixed the rabbit problem at by installing a plastic cap on a ventilation tube leading outside.

To compensate the students for the two-year-long rodent problem, Campus Life reduced their housing cost.

“I’m not sure what more can be done to help the matter,” Almont said. “But either way, it’s disgusting that we’re living with mice eating our food and crawling around in our bedrooms while we sleep. This isn’t what I signed up for—nor is it what I agreed to pay for—when I decided to live in a theme house.”