5 Places Mice Love to Hide In Your Home During the Winter

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When the weather outside is frightful in the wintertime, there is a decent chance your home is going to turn into a home for mice. Every year, about 30% of American homes have rodents living inside of them.

Some mice will come right out in the open after setting up shop in your home. They’ll invade your cupboards and rifle through the trash can in your kitchen looking for something to eat.

But mice in winter will also hide in various parts of your home and go undetected for weeks and even months on end in some cases. This will prevent you from being able to get rid of them—and the dangers that come along with having them in your home—in a timely fashion.

It’s a good idea for homeowners to learn about the different parts of a house where mice are known to hide. Here are five places you might find mice hiding in your home during the winter season.

1. Up in Your Attic

When mice first make their way into your home, the only thing they have on their minds is finding food and warmth. Once they know that they have those two things covered, they move on to worrying about the next thing: finding a place to build a nest so that they can stick around.

Mice like to build their nests in places where they know people won’t be. What better place to build a nest that will go undetected by humans than up in an attic space?

If you have mice in your attic, you’ll usually hear them running around, especially at night since mice are nocturnal creatures. You should call on a pest control company to check out the sounds you’re hearing up above your head.

If you don’t, mice could leave droppings and urine all over the place in your attic. It’ll spread dangerous diseases throughout your home and leave you with a huge cleanup job on your hands.

2. Down in Your Basement

While there are many mice that will make their way to the attic after infiltrating a home, it’s not always easy for them to get there. They often have to find out how to enter a home through a roofline to get access to the attic space.

It’s much easier for them to find a way down into your basement. There are usually all kinds of entry points leading from the exterior of your home down into your basement, which makes the basement a convenient place for mice in winter to set up shop.

Just like in your attic, mice won’t have to be too concerned about a nest in the basement being disturbed. They’ll also be able to get the darkness and warmth they desire in most basement spaces.

It’s smart to keep your basement as clutter-free as it can be to prevent a rodent infestation. You should also get into the habit of inspecting your basement for any signs of mice, both during the winter and during the other seasons.

3. Out in Your Garage

Most garages aren’t heated like the inside of homes are. This might lead you to believe that mice wouldn’t have much of an interest in invading a garage.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Garages provide mice with just enough warmth to survive, and they also sometimes have garbage cans in them that are filled with food for mice to eat.

As an added bonus, many garages give mice plenty of places to hide so that you won’t see them. They have no problem at all creating a warm nest in the middle of the sporting equipment you haven’t used in years or in the box containing all your Christmas decorations that you won’t touch again until next fall.

4. Inside Your Walls

If mice hide in your attic, your basement, or your garage, you can find them if you’re willing to look hard enough. But when they hide in your walls, it’s going to be really tough for you to know that they’re in there.

This is a big part of the reason why mice love hiding inside the walls of homes. It gives them all the protection they could ever ask for and allows them to move around within your home without spooking you.

It can be difficult to detect mice hiding in your home’s walls. But you can do it if you listen out for them. You should be on high alert if you hear any scratching sounds or movement behind the walls in your home.

You’ll want to get a pest control company that specializes in dealing with pests in winter on the phone immediately.

5. In the Back of Your Pantry

At the end of the day, mice enter homes in the winter because they’re hungry. They need to find something to eat to sustain themselves until winter is over.

With that in mind, many of them choose to hide as close to the food in your home as they can. More specifically, many of them will often hide out right in the back of a pantry or up in cabinets containing food.

Seeing a mouse scurrying around in your kitchen can be unnerving. But it’ll let you know that you probably have a much bigger problem with mice than you realize. You’ll need to reach out to a pest control company to see if you have more mice hiding in other parts of your home.

Don’t Let Mice in Winter Wreak Havoc on Your Home

Few things are scarier to the average homeowner than seeing mice in winter. You won’t feel 100% comfortable when you know you have mice living in your house.

You also might put yourself, your family, and even your pets at risk if you don’t do something about mice in winter in your home. Mice can carry lots of different diseases and pass them on to people and their pets.

We can deliver the pest control services you need to get rid of mice in your home. We can make sure mice stay away for good, too, so that you don’t need to worry about them coming back in the future.