“Well, one thing that could help is make sure that the radiators are dust free,” the man commented. “Just take a vacuum to them.” He was sitting on a chair in our living room, talking to us about our furnace, possible replacements and overall issues with heating our 200+ year old home.

We looked at each other guiltily.

Oops!

I peeked over at the closest radiator. Even without removing the metal strips, I could see dust inside, and it may just have been a slight breeze moving through(remember…old house!), but I think one of the larger clusters waved at me tauntingly. I immediately added “Vacuum out the radiators” to my towering mental list of good intentions.

Fast forward a month or two and we’re in full home improvement mode. No, we haven’t vacuumed out the radiators yet, but we’re repainting the living room. We’ve removed the furniture from the room and Kurt has repaired various cracks and divots. The ceilings are done and it’s time to clean the walls and trim and get that started. This is all to explain how I came to be sitting on the floor, taking the long, external metal plates off the radiator, with the vaccuum sitting next to me, looking appropriately serious and intense. We both suspected this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.

We had no idea.

I removed the splice plate and the two long metal strips came off easily. For your reference, below is a picture of what the inside of a clean baseboard radiator looks like. Add about an inch of accumulated dust and grit to this and you’ll have an idea what mine looked like.

“EW!” I exclaimed, calling out to my husband who was in another part of the house. “Kurt, I could make a small animal out of this!”

Dust lay like a thick Shetland sweater over the heater fins. (No wonder we’d had a hard time heating this room!) I reached over and peeled a thick layer up and off. I think I may have blushed. This was even outside of my normal low housekeeping standards! Thank heavens for a sturdy vacuum. I gave it an affectionate pat, turned it on and we got to work.

There’s a deep satisfaction to listening to grit and debris getting sucked into a vacuum. I watched the dust zip away, feeling ever more virtuous. Bit by bit the radiator fins came into sight, as did a few lost treasures–a marble, a random earring, some paperclips. I was going to have the cleanest baseboard radiators in town!

That’s when it happened. The vacuum came to an especially thick clump of dust and didn’t tidily suck it away. Oh, it tried valiantly, but the dust clump remained. I tried a few different angles. Nothing worked. Turning off the vacuum, I poked with my finger at the stubborn clump. Why wouldn’t it go up the vacuum hose? Was it another earring? A toy lost long ago? I leaned in to take a closer look.

Uh oh

“Kurt,” I wailed. “I’m pretty sure there are feet in this dust clump!”

Whatever it was, it had clearly been there a long time and had no intention of disappearing up a vacuum hose. I held my breath, took the vacuum attachment and carefully poked it under an edge of the clump, flipping it up and over. The soles of four little feet came into view, pointing stiffly upward. Beneath the shroud of thick dust were the desiccated remains of a small critter.

“It’s a mouse!” I shrieked.

“Well, get rid of it,” Kurt answered, still safely away in the other room.

“Do you realize that all the times we said, ‘Oh, something smells bad. I guess something must have died in the walls’ (which if you have ever lived in an old house is just a thing that gets said sometimes), there was actually some creature cooking on our radiator! In the same room with us! And we were breathing that air!?!”

I said this, in various iterations multiple times.

“The very air we were breathing!”

“It was just right there, cooking away!”

“It was like a mouse barbecue!”

Then finally, after disposing of the remains, I announced, “Kurt, this is so disgusting. If you ever tell anyone about this, I am going to deny it.”

Unless I write about it…

Note: This morning as I write this (and I kid you not!), my cat is poised in the corner where the radiator meets the wall. She hasn’t moved for food or affection, both an essential part of her morning routine. She’s gazing intensely at the radiator. Her tail is twitching. Every so often she madly scrabbles her paws underneath the metal plates. I know what this means!