I had a pair of foxes raise a litter of kits under my garden shed. They were so cute and fun to watch!
Well they left me with fleas. I had to seal off the foundation of the shed, cut holes in the floor, and drop some nasty pesticides (phosgene) under, and seal it back up.
Currently dealing with mice. They can’t actually get into the home, but they’re in the walls and attic. I’ve got traps up a few places but they rarely catch anything. I and caught one under my kitchen sink last night while trying to make a midnight snack. Caught me completely by surprice, but I scrambled for the biggest closest knife I could find, and chopped the motherfucker.
So I’m currently apparently dealing with it both passively with traps, and actively through brute force.
That’s nuts.
The mice here are very small and very fast. There’s just no way I could get one with a knife and I’m pretty spry.
I’ve learned a few things about dealing with mice in my time…
If you’ve seen one you probably have dozens.
If they die in a wall cavity there’s nothing you can do. They will stink, you’ve just got to wait it out. Used ground coffee in a dish or whatever tends to absorb the smell.
There’s lots of different types of traps. You probably need to experiment with different types. For example the spring loaded ones don’t work for very small mice. Also I dislike the no-kill ones because then you have to deal with a live mouse. One of the most impressive I’ve seen is like a lid on a bucket with a trapdoor - it’s what farmers use in a plague.
Poison is another good option but be aware it usually has an attractant. If you can hear mice in your ceiling you don’t want to put the poison in your ceiling because you’ll get more mice in your ceiling. Put the poison outside to draw the mice out.
Cats are also a good option.
My cat got rid of the mice issue, but then there’s a roach issue. Cats unfortunately cannot get rid of roaches. 🤷♂️
I was pretty surprises I got it too. It scrambled to get under my trash bucket for a bit which gave me the chance to chop. While there’s definately a fair few mice, it’s not like it’s an infestation. I grew up on a farm so I’m pretty used to them.
Thanks for the advice though :)
This is all good advice. I just wanted to point out that most of the traps on Amazon are knockoffs of the Flip & Slide from Rinne Corp. Shawn Woods covers it here on Mousetrap Mondays: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pHwvVPT202Y
His channel is great, and I believe he mentions in a later video that besides stealing Rinne’s design, many of the knockoffs don’t work as well due to sloppier manufacturing tolerances. I’ve ordered from them (both this design and Shawn Wood’s Dizzy Dunker) and I felt better than if I had bought a counterfeit through Amazon.
im only able to catch them with a large stick if i surprise them, but usually the glue traps are the best methods, if you know where to put them, like where they shit and piss alot, and one of thier “walkways”
Have had good luck with electronic traps. Caught mice and a couple of rats that were hanging around our driveway and chewing up car cables.
I got one with wifi that sends a message when it caught something. Good for out of the way spots. Trap with peanut butter. For deterrence, ended up spraying the area with capsicum pepper spray.
https://www.victorpest.com/store/mouse-control/electronic-traps
Wasps nested in my walls. I sucked them out with a Vacuum then put in some insecticide.
Here is a picture of the wasps in my vacuum:
Well that’s nightmare fuel. Cudos to you for sorting it.
It was pretty bad. Every day a few wasps would find there way inside the house through lightning fixtures. I was freaking out, but some googling and advice from friends helped me sort it out. When I went outside I was able to quickly identify where they were coming in since there were so many wasps coming and going. The vacuum made them furious but they just kept attacking the nozzle and getting sucked in. Once I had sucked up the bulk of them it was safe to inject some insecticide and then eventually caulk up the entrance.
Did you use an extra long hose attachment? Wear some type of protection? That would be super scary! They can be so aggressive! We had some that chased a friend across the yard.
I wore a hoody with a mask and glasses to protect my face at first, but needed none of that. The wasps exclusively attacked the nozzle and at no point came anywgere near me.
Got the occasional mouse, but I usually only notice after my cats got to them first.
Or they hunt them outside and bring the corpse back, really couldn’t tell.
Termites.
Mutiple professional treatments to eradicate them from the property and surrounds, then major structural repairs, for which the place had to be vacant.
0/10, do not recommend.
Out of curiosity, were you on the hook for the entire cost? As it, was any of it covered by insurance?
It doesn’t sound like much fun at all.
Not covered by insurance, and yeah it was not a great time for us.
Generally insurance won’t cover something like that.
Rats. Killed two a night with traps. They’d keep coming.
Got a cat.
I live in an old house, so sometimes mice find their way in. Never really a huge problem though. I catch them with live traps and let them out a few km away. Don’t think I’ve had any in the last couple months.
I have ants. Teeny tiny little ones. I’ve tried sprays, repellents, traps. The sprays only work if I spray the ants directly. The repellants don’t work at all. They ignore the traps. They just won’t go away.
That’s not very encouraging: I’m battling those now. Ive been constrained by kids and a dog so I haven’t want to use sprays…… yesterday, I sprayed the exterior with ant spray, and the interior where they’ve been with clove oil,so we’ll see. This morning there are fewer fwiw
Have you identified the ants? That should help.
I was finally able to stop a seasonal invasion by leaving out gel/bait. They formed columns to it and were talking it back under the house for like a week.
This year so far no sign of them and all of the ant hills around the yard also seem dead. I think it was a single huge colony.
Have you tried boric acid? I originally used it for cockroaches but I’ve also had success with ants (regular ones, not teeny tiny little ones :) ).
Have you considered getting an anteater as a pet?
Cockroaches. It was bad. They were everywhere. You couldn’t open a door without them falling from the cracks in the doorframe on your face.
Boric acid is what helped as recommended by reddit. We used to clean, and spray with Pyrethrins before that but that only kills the visible ones. Most of the roaches are in their holes and you’ll never reach them like that.
What’s great about boric acid is that it kills slowly meaning they can infect each other before they die in a chain reaction. They infect even the hidden ones when they go groom each other.
So clean the area, dry it, then just spread the powder where they usually hang out. It’ll take a week to notice any effects. Apply again if area gets wet.
Another great thing is unless you ingest a huge amount or inhale it in your lungs, boric acid is mostly safe for humans. Unlike the sprays which always gave us symptoms.
Another satisfied customer of boric acid.
Viewed a flat on a Sunday, went ahead and rented it. Realized after moving in that all the sandwich shops serving the nearby uni Monday-Friday drew an ungodly amount of cockroaches. I hated getting up for a glass of water in the middle of the night because I knew the horror show I’d see upon entering the kitchen after dark.
Roach traps didn’t make a dent, and we had two cats so didn’t want to go in for heavy duty poisons.
Read about boric acid in a Metafilter post, spread some along the usual scurrying areas and… wow! Barely saw one ever again.
mine was these roach gel baits when we had an infestation of tiny cockroaches (around 12-15 mm in size)
just apply a pea size every 2 ft where light cant get them (and your pets), cover or hide any other food sources like trash or table scraps them bam! you’ll be sweeping swarms of dead roaches several days after.
then repeat application every 6 months
Yes, it was terrible. She was super invasive. She wouldn’t leave even after I broke up with her. We were both on the lease, so I couldn’t kick her out, so I just quit paying rent. We both got evicted.
Although extreme, that did finally work. Worst pest ever.
Childhood spring one year, conditions were perfect for millipedes. The basement floor was covered in them. I mean covered with the floor barely visible.
They weren’t damaging or dangerous, just disgusting. My dad put on his outdoor shoes and just walked around in tiny steps smashing them. He walked for hours. Then scraped them up with a plastic snow shovel and threw them outdoors for the birds to go wild. Then walked some more.
No other spring since has resulted in those sorts of numbers. It was interesting to see my dad’s reaction: the disgust and fascination and satisfaction. God help him if he ever discovers pimple popper videos and the like, we would lose him to the algorithm.
This is one of the worst things I have ever read
Why, thank you. Your comment is worth more than all the upvotes.
I think i would handle that with a shop vac. Suck em up, take the vac outside near the bird feeder, maybe even prime the birds with a little scattered seeds, then open the shop vac and walk briskly away
This deserves to be in a movie. I don’t know the genre or plot, but it would be one of those scenes you never forget.
Homework assignment for a film class: design this vignette in the style of various directors, from Cronenburg body horror to Wes Anderson grief-filled comedy and color palette.
Millipedes or centipedes? I always used to get the names backwards, but centipedes are the nightmare fuel one (to my mind), lighting fast and all legs. Millipedes, the legs are less dominantly noticeable an I think of as more of a forest-floor, under-a-log kind of thing.
I just found and smashed a couple of centipedes in my house the past couple days. My reaction is instinctual and violent. It freaks me out to wonder what they’ve been eating to get so large.
Pretty sure it was millipedes. Lots of little legs that go down below the body, versus fewer legs that stick out to the side. And they smelled when squished.
Weird! Ok, I’m less horrified now.
Come to think if it, centipedes are too fast for the thing your dad did. I bet millipides are a lot crunchier though.
The only thing I ever had were food moths, after leaving an open container of flour out and putting it away after a day. It was pretty disgusting having their larvae crawling around, but luckily there are parasitic wasps you can order that kill their eggs (they look like tiny specks of dust, not normal wasps).
Parasitic wasps sound scarier than moths.
Sounds scary, but it was literally tiny specks of dust that moved in my pantry. Nothing that was identifiable as an insect. And after the moths died out, they also died out by themselves.
Mice isnan ongoing issue. We have tube traps they get stuck in, they get drowned in a bucket of water and then thrown out for the birds to eat. Tube traps are very effective if poison isn’t an option.
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rats or mice (not sure which one is correct in english) - my father sealed the pipe they were coming from. not that serious (there weren’t many rats) but it was pretty scary.
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termites - replaced the old wooden door with another door. my house isn’t made of wood so it wasn’t very serious, but it was annoying.
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wasps - thousands of them all bunched up in one spot in the garage, dealt with using smoke and fire. they hadn’t made a nest yet as they’d appeared suddenly.
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three times:
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rats - tore out two walls and a ceiling looking for their ingress. Found the hole, sealed it, took advantage of the situation to insulate and refinish the room, no problems since.
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mice - set traps while improving home infra. Raised shelves, removed things acting at mouse ladders, started keeping grains in sealed, hard-sided containers. Went around the outside of the house removing clutter and harboring plants, planted herbs that repel rodents instead. Sprayed essential oils for several weeks as a deterrent, and placed a few permanent traps as check for effectiveness. No mice in the years since.
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water roaches - boiled or threw out the items they seemed attracted to, used chemical scent obliterators on any adjacent surfaces. Placed pet-safe gel poison behind all the furniture in the kitchen. No problems since.
The joys of a fixer-upper home.
The ongoing pests are flies and birds. This summer I’ll be exposing and reinsulating the vent area above the finished attic and replacing the damaged louvers that the birds have nested in. The flies seem to crawl straight through the window sashes, though, no idea how to solve that one.
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