How to Keep Mice Out of Your Garage

For many people, a garage is a safe haven - a place where they can simply relax doing what they love, be that working on cars, working out, or completing yet another DIY project. Unfortunately, sometimes their little oasis stops being so peaceful due to mice and other rodents taking over. Once the mice appear, it might take some time before you’ll be able to completely clear them out, which is why the best idea is always to prevent mice infestations from happening in the first place.

So, how do you keep mice out of the garage? That’s a question we will be answering in the article below.

How to Recognize Mice Infestation?

Depending on how serious the mouse infestation in your garage is, you might see different signs, ranging from smelling an odor, seeing nests made around your garage, to even finding dead mice lying around the garage.

However, before you start anything to get rid of the mice, you need to determine whether it’s actually the mice that are the problem or rats. They usually leave the same signs, which is why you need to examine them closely. Mouse droppings, rub marks, tracks, etc., are usually smaller than rats’. What’s more, the easiest way in which you can determine which one you’re dealing with would be the noise. Mice tend to squeak quite often, while rats tend to make noise by scratching things or fighting.

Once you find out which one - mice or rats - is the issue, it will be a lot easier to get rid of them, which brings us to the second point.

How to Get Rid of Mice In Your Garage

If those small animals have already found a home in your garage - whether it’s a single mouse or a few mice - you need to take action and get rid of them before they start reproducing like crazy, and you’ll need to use professional pest control services. And trust us, they can grow from one to a hundred pretty quickly, as one doe can birth dozens of babies per year.

So, how do you get rid of mice? You need to do two things.

#1 Get Rid of Potential Nesting Materials or Food Sources

Look at your garage as if you were a mouse - is there anything that can attract mice? Mostly consider things that can either be consumed by them, or that can be used to make a nest. Some of the things that mice can use as a nesting material include:

• piles of things, especially piles of old newspapers or empty cardboard boxes
• old food and garbage 
• sacks with pet food (dog food, cat food, bird seed, etc.) or grass seed
• cushions for outdoor furniture 
• burlap

If you use your garage as storage for a car you don’t use or use very rarely, make sure to check it too - most importantly, under the hood and in the glove compartment. Also, remember to turn it on every once in a while to scare the mice from making nests inside it.

If there's any place where you have electrical wires on display, make sure to cover them, as hungry mice chew on whatever they can find, and if they chew through the wires, it's gonna create quite an issue for you. 

#2 Set Up Bait Stations

Once you get rid of all the things that can make the mice feel at home in your garage, it’s time to perform the second step of making your garage mouse-free, which is setting up bait stations - you can purchase them from any store that has rodent control items, as well as the internet, which would probably be the easiest way to go about it.

In order to know where to put them, just keep in mind that mice prioritize habits, which means that if they don’t have to, they will not look for food anywhere else. So, if there’s a place you suspect serves as the mice’s buffet, definitely place one of the bait stations there. It might take some time, but eventually, you will notice that the garage mice are no longer a problem.

How to Keep the Mice Out of Your Garage

After you’ve dealt with the rodents, the last thing you want is probably more mouse infestations. For this reason, you need to make sure that you make your garage mouse-proof. Some of the things you should do to ensure you won’t have to deal with a mouse problem in the future include:

• Seal all the possible entry points. If you don’t want the mice to invade your home, you need to make sure that there’s no way for them to enter. To make sure that you don’t miss anything, turn down the light in the garage and look for small holes that they would be able to use to get in as well as possible hiding places and seal them.
• Cut off the tree branches. If there’s a tree branch that touches the house, especially the attached garage, make sure that you cut it off, as mice can climb the tree to get inside a house.
• Make your garage a hostile environment. One of the best ways to repel mice is to make the garage a place they wouldn’t want to enter. While mice do not have any special requirements when it comes to the place they stay, there are some things that they can’t stand, like the smell of peppermint. Placing some peppermint oil in a few places around your garage - especially around storage areas - should be enough to deter mice.

The Bottom Line

The thing with mouse infestations is that if you don't deal with it fast enough, you might find yourself with rodents all around your house - and we're not talking about just a few of them, we're talking about the entire house being full of them. 

Of course, it would be in your best interest to keep it from happening altogether, but if you've already fallen victim to these pests, your best bet would be to get rid of them and make sure that it doesn't happen again - which you can do by following tips we have listed above. Good luck!