How To Tell If There Are Mice In Your Home

You will hardly ever see a mouse. They are timid, nocturnal creatures. If it’s crawling around your kitchen, it’s doing it under the cover of night. And if it hears you coming, it is going to get out of dodge before you flip those lights on. For this reason, mice are a threat to many families. If you don’t know they are in your home, you don’t realize that they are contaminating your food supply and leaving a variety of bacteria and decay on your dishes. A wild mouse is not something you want in your home. It brings the rot from that dumpster down the street right into your silverware drawer. That flu that kept your daughter out of school, or that stomach ache that plagued you while you were at work yesterday, could be bateria brought into your home on a mouse’s fur. So it is important to detect mice and have them removed immediately.

Here are signs that you have a mouse in your house.

• Mouse droppings. These tiny brown, pill-shaped pellets can be found anywhere a mouse is foraging. They don’t cease their search for food simply because they have to take a potty break. They’ll do it wherever they are. That means feces and urine where you store your plates, silverware, spatulas, and food. Mice are able to chew through your walls and get behind cabinets and drawers. They then drop down inside and explore. You’ll typically find their droppings at the back of these drawers.
• Chew marks. Mice love to chew wood and cardboard. If you have a mouse problem, it will often rear its ugly head as chew holes in your food boxes. If you are finding these, consider putting your food in hard plastic containers. Often this is enough to frustrate mice, and make them move to a house with easy access to food.
• Scraping. The worst way to find out you have a mouse, is to hear them in your walls at night. There isn’t much you can do about a mouse infestation at two in the morning. Hopefully, you have ear plugs. If not, you can always consider sleeping on the couch–though that presents its own set of problems. Mice are more apt to climb up the side of a couch than they are to find their way onto a bed.

If you have mice, don’t resort to do-it-yourself methods. You can’t afford to miss even one mouse. It’s not worth dealing with mysterious health issues.

What you need, is to seal up the holes around your home with a caulking gun until you can do proper repairs. Fill the bottom of your down spouts with wire mesh, and cut trees back away from your home so mice can’t get access to your roofline. Move construction material, or wood piles, away from your exterior walls. And keep your trash in sealed cans, so mice aren’t as curious to enter your yard.

Get with a professional and find out the many exclusion methods you can use to seal up your home. Every home is different. You might have entry points in your garage, while someone else has a hole in their exterior wall that is hidden behind their deck. A professional technician can find these entry points, and show you how you can get them sealed. Mouse removal isn’t just about laying down some traps, it is about sealing and protecting your home against any kind of infiltration. Even one sewer coated mouse sliding over your silverware is one mouse too many. Get proactive today, and protect your family from mice.

Contact Terminix Wil-Kil for rodent control.