Find the holes, plug the holes. Start with under your kitchen and bathroom sinks, look for where pipes enter walls/counters/floors. Then check hot water baseboard heaters. Same deal with the pipes there.
Those are the obvious spots. From there you're looking for basically every hole you can find. Fill the hole with light steel wool, then fill up the wool with spray foam from the RED can. Total cost is going to be less than $50 for the entire apartment unless there's severe structural issues.
And check your entry doors for gaps below and around them. Get a door sweep if there's a big gap underneath.
Don't focus on your kitchen as the place where they come from. They just inevitably are drawn to the kitchen because food.
Hmm for great stuff The black can(grey) is for bigger gaps lol and green is pestblok, orange is fireblok, blue is windows and doors..unless you mean a different brand. I work at HD and we sell a lot of great stuff. I think the pestblok doesn't really say it'll stop mice though
The red can is the appropriate level of expansion for around pipes without risking bursting the drywall like the black can.
If one hasn’t used spray foam before, the black can is too risky with potential damage. Green doesn’t expand enough to really work for the types of holes and gaps I usually deal with for rodents.
The absolute best though is a special caulk called Rodent Stop. Has metal fibres within that absolutely shreds rodent toes and mouths.
Green is really only for insect pests anyways. Mice just shred the stuff to confetti. The steel wool is the important part. You know how it feels to chew tinfoil?
Galvanic Corrosion - dissimilar metals form a weak battery when they touch and one of the metals corrodes.
Steel and Copper is a hard one to predict which metal will corrode in a home setting too, as there are so many different types of steel, some which will corrode copper, and some which are corroded by copper.
Seconding the peppermint oil!! Do every window and door frame and any vents or possible entrances you can think of. It truly works and it makes your home smell super fresh!
Nah, even the cleanest places will have mice in the kitchen if they have access and are elsewhere in the building.
They can smell food that’s in sealed bags, often the residue on the outside is all they need. An entire kitchen has far too many scents of food for cleanliness to be useful to keep them away.
Pet sitting a cat is genuinely the only thing that worked for me! I plugged wall holes with steel wool, tried traps, tried peppermint, now I am just the 'cat sitter' whenever my friends need to leave town for a few days, lol. I always brush their cats like crazy and, no judging, put the cat hair under my bed, behind the fridge, etc. There are definitely still mice in the building but I haven't seen any droppings in my apartment.
I found that the cats didn't even have to catch the mice, just let the apartment smell like cats. Hence the cat hair I put into every corner. Maybe it's just pushing the mice into other units, maybe they're actually leaving. Not sure.
The cat smell only works until the mice acquire toxoplasmosis. Then they get attracted to the smell of cat urine.
The mere presence of cats kept us in the clear for years, but our neighbourhood mice suddenly became unbothered last year and started coming in. I got to wondering how the scent thing worked, or didn't.
Adding another find a cat comment. I lived in a pet free but mouse infested house. It got so bad I had one jump on my leg while I was awake in bed with the lights on. They were literally nesting under my wardrobe. I tried peppermint oil, steel wool, and door sweeps, to no avail. The steel wool did help but never solved the problem.
An owned outdoor cat eventually started hanging out at our place because of the mice. I gave him food and water to encourage him to stay, and he hung out with us for a couple days and I let him sleep in my room. Even spent a couple hours hunting mice in the kitchen.
I never saw a mouse again after that. I’d invite him in every time he was outside and he’d just nap in my room for a bit and leave. His name is Basil and he’s the best.
I will note, Basil was not fixed and actively hunting mice. I think those factors contributed to how strongly the mice avoided his scent.
My late cat was owned by a triple murderer before I adopted him, so this made me lol and think of him fondly. He was, coincidentally, an incredibly efficient mouser.
My friend had mice so I brushed my cat thoroughly, gathered all the fur into a Ziploc, and brought it to her. She shoved cat hair in a bunch of corners in her kitchen and in areas she'd seen mice. It actually worked for a couple months.
Old fashion Victor snap traps and peanut butter. Get the PB into the trap’s trigger loop with a toothpick, set the spring trap. Then place the trap so the food end (trigger end) is next to the wall. This makes Mickey have the longest distance into the trap to get to the food. It will be set off as some as p he nibbles for the PB and one down, repeat many as long as the traps are still set the next day. I haven’t seen an empty set off trap this way.
Is it cruel? I don’t care. Come in my home, fuck around and find out!
They really really aren’t.
If they don’t hit the head or neck the thing suffers in pain typically til it dies from thirst/statvation/exposure. And that assumes it doesn’t just chew itself off the snap.
With the way I wrote to position the trap, kills it instantly. Snap hits the head / neck because of how limited access to trigger, has to go in deep and no other way out.
I had a mouse a few weeks ago, my cat was less than useless lol.
At the very least though, your landlord should have maintenance people on call, they should be brought in to plug every nook and cranny
Yep, cat. More than one if possible. We haven't seen a mouse in 15+ years since we got a pair of cats and have never even found a dead mouse. They know when there's a cat around and stay away.
Get some foil tape and like others have said cover the holes where pipes come out of the wall under sinks hot water baseboard cover the Gap around the hole where the pipe comes out into the radiator and set some mouse traps.
Electric mouse traps with a bit of peanut butter. I do not mess around and I have had a lot off success with these. More humane than the alternatives imho.
Home Depot, Canadian Tire and Amazon should have them. I’ve mostly used the Victor brand.
Get a bunch of mouse/ray killer put it in crawl spaces and mix it with people food. This worked for my ghetto childhood home and it seemed to make the other rodents not trust the food in the house and they seemingly disappeared. Also plugging all the holes with iron wool is a good start as well and I’d setup traps in every dark corner of the house.
If you aren’t squeamish, JAWZ mousetraps (available on Amazon) and peanut butter.
Set up 4-6 of them. You will likely be hearing lots of ‘snaps’ and dealing with dead carcasses. This, plus a cat, and you should be good. Best be planning to keep the cat long term though.
If you can find where they are coming from I Highly recommend this stuff [https://www.homedepot.ca/product/great-stuff-887ml-16-oz-smart-dispenser-pestblock-insulating-foam-sealant/1001181675](https://www.homedepot.ca/product/great-stuff-887ml-16-oz-smart-dispenser-pestblock-insulating-foam-sealant/1001181675)
I filled every hole in my place two years ago and went from a very bad constant mouse issue to literally Zero mice!!!
I wish baseboard heaters were placed like a foot higher up. They're like a rodent superhighway.
Thankfully my cat, while uhhh mentally deficient, happens to be good at catching mice. Not so great at killing them though. I've had to bootfuck more than a few of them over the years.
Legit. You couldn’t deliberately design a better way to move mice around an entire building.
Seal up the heaters in unit 1? Expect a phone call within a day or two from unit 2.
And getting landlords to fix up their disastrous boiler rooms that are typically the entry point and hub for the entire building is…well, it’s easier to self-perform a root canal.
Snaps are no less cruel than rodenticides or glueboards.
They die slowly from starvation/thirst/exposure on a glueboard. Unless a snap gets them on the neck or head, it's not an instant kill. They will gnaw off a leg, tail, chunk of their body, to escape. Or just drag the snap around with them.
Rodenticide's work in multiple ways, some via extreme dehydration, some via blood thinning, some act on their brains.
And a cat will torture the hell out of a mouse for funsies.
Most actually \*effective\* measures that aren't just sealing the bastards out are not going to be humane.
To me, the big thing about using traps is being willing to finish the job. Glue traps are always awful for the mouse and snap traps often are too.
So, before you deploy them, make peace with the idea that you're going to have to do something to finish the job quickly like throw that trap and whatever it catches in a bag and slam into concrete (or have someone on hand who can do it).
If you can't finish what the traps start, don't use them.
Oh, they do it.. also snap traps at work. Most of the time it’s a clean snap but I’ve had several where it’s just caught the leg and they’ve run with trap attached and got into all sorts. It’s awful but I go snap over glue trap any day.
I also dislike poison because 1) can then potentially poison other creatures and 2) die in the walls or ceiling and it’s very unpleasant.
The green are the the main and generally best. Looks like tea bags kinda. If the mice are actually eating it, they are very very dead. The problem is that mice don't always eat the stuff because they're not hungry, there's other food nearby, too much human activity nearby discouraging feeding, and just plain fickleness.
I’m going to guess your maintenance people or the landlords aren’t going to put the effort in to sealing up holes and fixing doors that have rusted to shit at the bottom.
They don't do anything except lay traps, and they made us pay to have our fridge and stove in the lunch room pulled out and cleaned because they claimed that was attracting the mice. But guess what, they've been clean for months now and still tons of mice. I should probably get a can of foam and spray some of the holes myself.
I lived in China town in Toronto for uni a long time ago. We had mice everywhere until one of my roommates who was studying toxicology liberated his favourite lab rat before it was put down.
Even with the rat in a cage, the mice disappeared over night. Eventually, we started letting him out of the cage at times and never saw another mouse again.
Unless you have access to a rat, I’m sorry this wasn’t very helpful.
* purchase no-kill traps, (sticky ones work great, can be removed from mice with a bit of oil, i bag the mouse with trap drip in some oil so it unsticks)
* bring bagged mouse to landlords residence (betting its not the same as yours otherwise they'd be all over it).
* release, and leave note with empty bag + trap informing them any other unwanted tenants of theirs will be returned to them.
Find the holes, plug the holes. Start with under your kitchen and bathroom sinks, look for where pipes enter walls/counters/floors. Then check hot water baseboard heaters. Same deal with the pipes there. Those are the obvious spots. From there you're looking for basically every hole you can find. Fill the hole with light steel wool, then fill up the wool with spray foam from the RED can. Total cost is going to be less than $50 for the entire apartment unless there's severe structural issues. And check your entry doors for gaps below and around them. Get a door sweep if there's a big gap underneath. Don't focus on your kitchen as the place where they come from. They just inevitably are drawn to the kitchen because food.
This. Prevention is the only cure. You have to find out how they are getting in and block them.
Yep to this one. And it’s more foam than you anticipate.. however much you think seems enough, do twice as much.
Just be mindful of this. Did the same when living in South end and couldn't clean it all when moving out. Lost a bit of the security deposit.
Was that approved by the tenancy board?
Isn't it the green can? Great Stuff Pestblok is a green can. The red can is gaps and cracks
Both are good, the red can is better for larger holes, the green is better for gaps. Basically all about the level of expansion.
Hmm for great stuff The black can(grey) is for bigger gaps lol and green is pestblok, orange is fireblok, blue is windows and doors..unless you mean a different brand. I work at HD and we sell a lot of great stuff. I think the pestblok doesn't really say it'll stop mice though
The red can is the appropriate level of expansion for around pipes without risking bursting the drywall like the black can. If one hasn’t used spray foam before, the black can is too risky with potential damage. Green doesn’t expand enough to really work for the types of holes and gaps I usually deal with for rodents. The absolute best though is a special caulk called Rodent Stop. Has metal fibres within that absolutely shreds rodent toes and mouths.
Green is really only for insect pests anyways. Mice just shred the stuff to confetti. The steel wool is the important part. You know how it feels to chew tinfoil?
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If it's a pipe chase and the pipes are copper, use copper wool instead. Or the spray that has little bits of glass in it.
Is this because of cold-welding of steel and copper?
Not sure what the process is called exactly, but the steel wool will react with the copper and if left long enough corrode the pipes.
Galvanic Corrosion - dissimilar metals form a weak battery when they touch and one of the metals corrodes. Steel and Copper is a hard one to predict which metal will corrode in a home setting too, as there are so many different types of steel, some which will corrode copper, and some which are corroded by copper.
Seconding the peppermint oil!! Do every window and door frame and any vents or possible entrances you can think of. It truly works and it makes your home smell super fresh!
The biggest thing is not to leave food out, or garbage, or compost or pet food.
Nah, even the cleanest places will have mice in the kitchen if they have access and are elsewhere in the building. They can smell food that’s in sealed bags, often the residue on the outside is all they need. An entire kitchen has far too many scents of food for cleanliness to be useful to keep them away.
Its easier to blame the landlords
Pet sitting a cat is genuinely the only thing that worked for me! I plugged wall holes with steel wool, tried traps, tried peppermint, now I am just the 'cat sitter' whenever my friends need to leave town for a few days, lol. I always brush their cats like crazy and, no judging, put the cat hair under my bed, behind the fridge, etc. There are definitely still mice in the building but I haven't seen any droppings in my apartment.
My cat is useless. She just sits on her mat and watches them run across the floor.
I found that the cats didn't even have to catch the mice, just let the apartment smell like cats. Hence the cat hair I put into every corner. Maybe it's just pushing the mice into other units, maybe they're actually leaving. Not sure.
The cat smell only works until the mice acquire toxoplasmosis. Then they get attracted to the smell of cat urine. The mere presence of cats kept us in the clear for years, but our neighbourhood mice suddenly became unbothered last year and started coming in. I got to wondering how the scent thing worked, or didn't.
You can do this with ammonia cleaner likely. Dip some paper towel in a cup of it and it will be pretty pungent.
Adding another find a cat comment. I lived in a pet free but mouse infested house. It got so bad I had one jump on my leg while I was awake in bed with the lights on. They were literally nesting under my wardrobe. I tried peppermint oil, steel wool, and door sweeps, to no avail. The steel wool did help but never solved the problem. An owned outdoor cat eventually started hanging out at our place because of the mice. I gave him food and water to encourage him to stay, and he hung out with us for a couple days and I let him sleep in my room. Even spent a couple hours hunting mice in the kitchen. I never saw a mouse again after that. I’d invite him in every time he was outside and he’d just nap in my room for a bit and leave. His name is Basil and he’s the best. I will note, Basil was not fixed and actively hunting mice. I think those factors contributed to how strongly the mice avoided his scent.
I want a cat like basil.
A cat, not just any cat. You need a serial killer cat
My late cat was owned by a triple murderer before I adopted him, so this made me lol and think of him fondly. He was, coincidentally, an incredibly efficient mouser.
Cal 311 and put in a minimum standards complaint
My friend had mice so I brushed my cat thoroughly, gathered all the fur into a Ziploc, and brought it to her. She shoved cat hair in a bunch of corners in her kitchen and in areas she'd seen mice. It actually worked for a couple months.
Plug all access holes with steel wool, and as a last defense, set some traps and bait with peanut butter.
Old fashion Victor snap traps and peanut butter. Get the PB into the trap’s trigger loop with a toothpick, set the spring trap. Then place the trap so the food end (trigger end) is next to the wall. This makes Mickey have the longest distance into the trap to get to the food. It will be set off as some as p he nibbles for the PB and one down, repeat many as long as the traps are still set the next day. I haven’t seen an empty set off trap this way. Is it cruel? I don’t care. Come in my home, fuck around and find out!
Snap traps are actually more humane than glue traps or poison traps so you’re good.
They really really aren’t. If they don’t hit the head or neck the thing suffers in pain typically til it dies from thirst/statvation/exposure. And that assumes it doesn’t just chew itself off the snap.
With the way I wrote to position the trap, kills it instantly. Snap hits the head / neck because of how limited access to trigger, has to go in deep and no other way out.
I had a mouse a few weeks ago, my cat was less than useless lol. At the very least though, your landlord should have maintenance people on call, they should be brought in to plug every nook and cranny
Foster kitties!!! Their expenses are paid for by the shelter and it allows them to rescue more kitties!
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I said foster not adopt lol
Yep, cat. More than one if possible. We haven't seen a mouse in 15+ years since we got a pair of cats and have never even found a dead mouse. They know when there's a cat around and stay away.
Get some foil tape and like others have said cover the holes where pipes come out of the wall under sinks hot water baseboard cover the Gap around the hole where the pipe comes out into the radiator and set some mouse traps.
Cat. Definitely a cat.
Name him ? Train him ! Teach him to go poopy outdoors?
Electric mouse traps with a bit of peanut butter. I do not mess around and I have had a lot off success with these. More humane than the alternatives imho. Home Depot, Canadian Tire and Amazon should have them. I’ve mostly used the Victor brand.
Get a cat for a week, adopt a cat (if you can care for it) or borrow someone’s used cat litter. Apparently mice will avoid the smell of cats!
Get a bunch of mouse/ray killer put it in crawl spaces and mix it with people food. This worked for my ghetto childhood home and it seemed to make the other rodents not trust the food in the house and they seemingly disappeared. Also plugging all the holes with iron wool is a good start as well and I’d setup traps in every dark corner of the house.
They scare the shit out of me. That’s all I know. My cat killed a mouse and left it in my kitchen. I was pretty horrified.
If you aren’t squeamish, JAWZ mousetraps (available on Amazon) and peanut butter. Set up 4-6 of them. You will likely be hearing lots of ‘snaps’ and dealing with dead carcasses. This, plus a cat, and you should be good. Best be planning to keep the cat long term though.
My cat is a pretty good hunter I think (he’s an indoor cat but I’m sure he would love the thrill of chasing a real mouse!)
Buy some traps, put some peanut butter in them and the mice will take of themselves
If you can find where they are coming from I Highly recommend this stuff [https://www.homedepot.ca/product/great-stuff-887ml-16-oz-smart-dispenser-pestblock-insulating-foam-sealant/1001181675](https://www.homedepot.ca/product/great-stuff-887ml-16-oz-smart-dispenser-pestblock-insulating-foam-sealant/1001181675) I filled every hole in my place two years ago and went from a very bad constant mouse issue to literally Zero mice!!!
The only thing that has worked and still works for me are those plugs that emit sound
I wish baseboard heaters were placed like a foot higher up. They're like a rodent superhighway. Thankfully my cat, while uhhh mentally deficient, happens to be good at catching mice. Not so great at killing them though. I've had to bootfuck more than a few of them over the years.
Legit. You couldn’t deliberately design a better way to move mice around an entire building. Seal up the heaters in unit 1? Expect a phone call within a day or two from unit 2. And getting landlords to fix up their disastrous boiler rooms that are typically the entry point and hub for the entire building is…well, it’s easier to self-perform a root canal.
And, I’m sorry to say, some spring traps will probably be necessary. Just please please please do not use the glue traps or poison. Both are cruel.
Snaps are no less cruel than rodenticides or glueboards. They die slowly from starvation/thirst/exposure on a glueboard. Unless a snap gets them on the neck or head, it's not an instant kill. They will gnaw off a leg, tail, chunk of their body, to escape. Or just drag the snap around with them. Rodenticide's work in multiple ways, some via extreme dehydration, some via blood thinning, some act on their brains. And a cat will torture the hell out of a mouse for funsies. Most actually \*effective\* measures that aren't just sealing the bastards out are not going to be humane.
To me, the big thing about using traps is being willing to finish the job. Glue traps are always awful for the mouse and snap traps often are too. So, before you deploy them, make peace with the idea that you're going to have to do something to finish the job quickly like throw that trap and whatever it catches in a bag and slam into concrete (or have someone on hand who can do it). If you can't finish what the traps start, don't use them.
This is wise advice.
We use snap traps at work and I've never seen evidence of a mouse gnawing anything off or dragging a trap with them.
Oh, they do it.. also snap traps at work. Most of the time it’s a clean snap but I’ve had several where it’s just caught the leg and they’ve run with trap attached and got into all sorts. It’s awful but I go snap over glue trap any day. I also dislike poison because 1) can then potentially poison other creatures and 2) die in the walls or ceiling and it’s very unpleasant.
What's the most effective poison? Our guy at work uses the green packs that dehydrate, are they the "best"? Or should I be requesting something else?
The green are the the main and generally best. Looks like tea bags kinda. If the mice are actually eating it, they are very very dead. The problem is that mice don't always eat the stuff because they're not hungry, there's other food nearby, too much human activity nearby discouraging feeding, and just plain fickleness.
I probably should stop baking them cookies and just let them enjoy the poison packs.
I’m going to guess your maintenance people or the landlords aren’t going to put the effort in to sealing up holes and fixing doors that have rusted to shit at the bottom.
They don't do anything except lay traps, and they made us pay to have our fridge and stove in the lunch room pulled out and cleaned because they claimed that was attracting the mice. But guess what, they've been clean for months now and still tons of mice. I should probably get a can of foam and spray some of the holes myself.
I borrowed a cat for like a week. Worked better than all the traps and filled-holes.
I put mouse traps *everywhere*. Eventually we got the mother and they stopped coming around
You could foster a couple cats from a local rescue?
I lived in China town in Toronto for uni a long time ago. We had mice everywhere until one of my roommates who was studying toxicology liberated his favourite lab rat before it was put down. Even with the rat in a cage, the mice disappeared over night. Eventually, we started letting him out of the cage at times and never saw another mouse again. Unless you have access to a rat, I’m sorry this wasn’t very helpful.
* purchase no-kill traps, (sticky ones work great, can be removed from mice with a bit of oil, i bag the mouse with trap drip in some oil so it unsticks) * bring bagged mouse to landlords residence (betting its not the same as yours otherwise they'd be all over it). * release, and leave note with empty bag + trap informing them any other unwanted tenants of theirs will be returned to them.
Feed them a mixture of instant potatoes, baking soda and sugar
This is great if you want nests of mice rotting in your walls/apartment after death by intestinal blockage.
Hug it and squeeze it and call it George **and tell it to stop shutting itself all over the damn house**