Eliminating Mice from your Home

Get tips on eliminating mice and other rodents from your home. Hiring an exterminator and putting down bait are the first steps to getting ride of these unwanted visitors.

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LESLIE: Heading over to New York to chat with Ken about some unwanted visitors. You’ve got mice, huh?

KEN: I have a drop ceiling in my basement and it has insulation in it; fiberglass. I think – I believe it’s fiberglass now.

LESLIE: OK.

KEN: And there are plenty of droppings there inside the – on the ceiling tiles. I was just wondering if they were nesting up there. They suggested removal of the fiberglass insulation but will that make my basement colder or my upstairs first floor colder or …?

TOM: First of all, you need to get rid of the mice problem here, Ken, and there’s a couple of things that you can do to try to make it a little less inviting. First of all, I would suggest that you put down some bait because bait is very effective.

KEN: Yeah, I have that down already. The exterminator was in already, yeah.

TOM: Alright. OK, so you had the exterminator. Did you also – did he talk to you about inspecting the outside of the siding? Because very often you’ll have some little holes that’ll form in the siding or right …

LESLIE: And they can be the tiniest holes; like the size of nickels.

TOM: Yeah. And even right under the siding that’s up into that same space. And a way to deal with that is to take some steel wool and kind of stuff it in there so that they can’t get in. As Leslie said, they don’t need much space; maybe something the size of a quarter or so they can squeeze right in. So make sure you inspect the outside perimeter of your house to try to identify any spaces that the mice can be getting in.

LESLIE: And generally, Ken, if you sign up with some sort of service contract with an exterminator who will work with you maybe in like over two or three months to solve this problem – especially this time of year, they’re looking to come inside – the exterminator should, in their package, you know, go around the perimeter of your home and look for all of these holes and seal them. I know I live, I think, in a similar area to where you live in New York and we had a similar problem in the fall season and I hired a company and a gentleman came and he found holes that I missed, which is where they were coming in. And it wasn’t a huge expense for us.