It was funny, in a sick kind of way. The folks who built the house, around 1970, didn't know what they were doing. The rear wall siding wasn't put on right, which allowed water in, and rotted the sills in my bedroom. Thus, the floor collapsed, leaving a gap between the floor and the outside walls. I fixed that by nailing sheet steel around the room, bent into an angle, with sides and floor about 8 inches each. The mice could still get INTO the walls, though, and we could hear them pushing pieces of dog food up the walls at night, then letting them rattle back to the bottom. Mice like to have fun...
Since they were in the walls, they could get onto the house, any where they could find, or make a hole in the drywall. Usually behind something, where we couldn't get to it. At one time I had 8 mousetraps in my bedroom, and they were still nesting in the dresser drawers. Around the traps....
The builders also framed the house for one size of windows in the bedrooms, then used a different size. We found that when we had new siding and windows put in, before the floor collapsed. The windows they actually used were recycled wood, from a C&O section house. We know that, because they had "C&O" stamped on the unpainted portions!
We think they ran out of money halfway through, and cut corners to finish. We bought it about 8 years later, so couldn't see the problems. It looked good when we moved in. We moved out 18 years later, and use it for a storage shed.
