The pitter patter of tiny feet

And before you get too excited (mum!) it's not exactly what you think.

We have issues. Serious serious issues in our little house in Southfields. Paul and I are reasonably house-proud individuals, me more so than him and at the moment we're feeling kinda yucky about living here.

As you know, we live on the first floor and in the loft of a converted Victorian house and up until recently we've really loved living here. It's not the coolest place on the block - think blue carpet, yellow walls, daggy rust-red couch and green tiles in the kitchen - but it's clean and homely and big enough for us to hang out in all day without bumping into each other (important!).

But lately things haven't been so nice. Paul found a mushroom growing in our entrance way and it turns out we've got dry rot under the floor boards on the ground level. This is going to be fixed by someone coming in, pulling up all the floorboards in the entry and getting a humidifier in to dry up underneath. This could take weeks and meanwhile we will have an area at the entrance to our house that is completely exposed to the ground underneath - not ideal.

Well, it gets worse. I was in the kitchen last Sunday afternoon making a cup of tea when I noticed that the floor looked kinda swollen and when you stepped on it, it was squishy. I called Paul in (interrupted him playing his music - not happy) to confirm my fears and he proceeded to pull the dishwasher and washing machine out from underneath the bench top to see what was leaking - we found a bit of water but to our absolute horror also found MOUSE POO!

Eeooow!

So we spent the best part of last Sunday evening setting poison, plugging up holes with steel wool, bleaching everything we could possibly think of that may have come into contact with ungodly rodents and dry-heaving!

The landlord came to visit on Friday to investigate and the flooring under our lino in the kitchen is saturated (I don't think they connected the dishwasher properly) so the lino has been ripped up and we are attempting to dry out the floor. Our kitchen now looks like this ... The plastic bags around the dishwasher and washing machine are Paul's attempt at trying to ensure that mousey-mousey doesn't venture into our territory (he heard something squeaking last night so said poison clearly hasn't kicked in yet).

There goes my cooking mojo.