Want to know how to remove mice from your home?
If you notice small droppings in various places in your home, you need to act fast. Mice can reproduce very quickly, so one or two mice can quickly become a troubling infestation.
In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at how to remove mice from your home.
How to Remove Mice From Your Home
No one likes the idea of mice being in their home. They’re noisy, unsanitary, and will cause damage.
Luckily, you don’t have to put up with them for long, though. There are a few ways you can dissuade them from being in your home.
Before we share a few methods, we encourage you to consider calling a professional rodent control service near you. This will be the fastest, most efficient way to get rid of mice from your home.
Here’s how to remove mice from your home.
Close Up Those Entry Points
If you want to get rid of mice, then you need to get rid of the points they’re getting into your home. This does pose a challenge, as mice are capable of squeezing themselves through the tiniest gaps. It’s amazing what they’ll do in order to get at food.
Take a walk around your home, and look for any likely gap or crack. If you can fit a pencil in there, you can most likely get a mouse through it. Use caulk to seal up the crack, and add in steel wool. Mice are great at chewing through things, but they won’t be able to get through steel wool.
Look for gaps in the foundation, as well as openings in the walls, such as pipes and vents. Also, make sure you’re using weather stripping on door and window gaps. The more gaps you seal up, the fewer entry points the mice have.
Set Mouse Traps
If you’re looking to remove mice for good, then you’ll need to invest in some traps. You can go for either live traps or snap traps, depending on your needs.
If you go for live traps, you’ll need to be willing to take those traps far away from your home, so you can release the mice. You may need to do this multiple times, although you can also go for multi-capture live traps to make things easier on you.
Not worried about letting the mouse out alive? Then you have a few options. There’s the classic snap trap, as well as glue traps. The benefit of these is that once they catch the house, they will die and you’ll be sure they can’t come back.
There are a couple of things to consider when using traps for mice:
Bait: You’ll need the right bait, to attract the mice and get them into your traps. If you want to get the best bait, you can buy bait packages. These have preserved bait inside which has poison, so they’ll gnaw through the package, eat the bait, and die. If you buy these packages, you’ll need to take great care when using them.
If you’re using live traps, you can use a variety of bait. Mice love chocolate, peanut butter, bacon, oatmeal, dried fruit, and so on. Some like to secure the bait with a hot glue gun, so the mouse can’t make off with it before the trap triggers.
Mousetrap placement: You need those traps in the right spots, so mice are more likely to make their way into them. Mice never move too far from their nests, so place those traps anywhere you see signs of mice. That includes droppings or the greasy marks they leave against baseboards.
Place your traps perpendicular to the baseboard, with the trigger facing it. That way, the mouse will run into it from the right direction, and won’t set the trigger off early.
Keep Your House Clean
You may have thought you were keeping your house clean, but the fact that mice are in your home is making you worry otherwise. The fact is, a mouse can live on as little as 3 grams of food a day, so they don’t need very much to stay around.
You can put them off by removing those food sources at much as possible. Vacuuming your floors and wiping down counters regularly will be enough to do so. Keep any food you have in airtight containers, and don’t forget about your garbage. It’s nothing to mice to tear garbage bags open and get inside them, so seal them up in trash cans.
Remove Outside Sources
If the outside of your home is appealing to mice, they’re going to find their way inside. You can make some changes to your yard to put them off, though.
If there’s any debris around your home, you’ll want to remove it, so mice have nowhere to hide. Keep on top of weeds as much as you can, and destroy any nests when you find them. Another good way to keep mice out of your home is to line gravel around the foundation. A heavy gravel will stop them from burrowing through and getting in.
The more debris you take away from your yard, the fewer places mice have to hide. They don’t like to be out in the open, so if you can keep the perimeter clear, they aren’t going to want to change it.
If you find evidence of mice in your home, there’s no need to panic. There are plenty of ways you can keep mice out of your home. Keep your house clean, set traps, and remove any hiding spots. If you can do that, then you’ll ensure that those mice never make it back in again.