Mousetrap Update

Way back in September, I had a post titled A Better Mousetrap, and said that I would get back to you with results.  For one reason or another, I never did until today. 

You can click on the link for the full story, but the gist of the thing was that mice had attacked one of the recliners in our 5th wheel camper, and I had set out two types of mouse traps to deal with them.

The old mechanical Victor mousetraps never caught anything, but the sticky traps did - they just didn’t catch any mice!  What they did catch was a lot of big ugly cockroaches, those big brown wood roaches that folks in Florida call palmetto bugs. I set off a couple of Raid Bug Bombs in the trailer, and a few days later, I vacuumed up over a hundred of the darn things. 

Problem solved – I set out some Combat discs just to be sure, but after several months we have seen no more signs of any infestation.

That brings us to this week.

The damage they had done was limited to the leather on one ottoman and the arms of one chair,  For some reason, the other chair and ottoman were untouched.  On Wednesday, I removed the arm pads from both chairs, and took them and both of the ottomans to a local upholstery shop.  I hoped that they could match the cream colored leather, but in case they couldn’t, I planned to have them recover both ottomans and all four arm pads with a compatible color - maybe a medium brown.

I didn’t think it would be very expensive, but  Boy, was I ever wrong!  The price they quoted would have gone well over $500 after taxes.  We said “No thanks” and left.

In all our travels, we have only used one of the recliners (you can’t see the TV from the other one) so on the way home from the upholstery shop, we had decided to just dump the damaged one.  Then, later that afternoon, I saw this on line:

It’s from the website of an Atlanta company called Recliner City that sells every sort of recliner imaginable.  They were on sale, and I was able to get two brand new leather recliners (the same size and shape as the old ones) for just over $250 – about half the cost of fixing the old one.