- LAST UPDATED: December 8, 2023
When the mice hide behind the furniture and appliances or scamper across the floor at night, that’s bad enough. But when they take up residence not only in walls but inside of the ceilings and floors, you may be at a loss as to how to effectively target them.
Mice may be hiding out in the basement, in holes in your cement foundation and floor – or in a dirt basement floor. They may be climbing up from there into your floor boards. Or, they may be breaking into the attic and then descending into the ceiling.
With their hideouts in these less accessible places, perhaps, you are struggling to trap them. Read on to learn how to get rid of mice in your basement and your ceiling.
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I Have Mice in My Basement: What Should I Do?
You can’t afford to ignore mice in you basement. They will spread from there to other parts of your house, bringing their diseases and disgusting, destructive ways with them.
But neither do you necessarily have to pay out big bucks to a professional mouse exterminator.
First of all, realize that basement mice are a common problem, in both city and country alike. So don’t panic. But second of all, put a well thought out extermination plan into action (more on that just below.)
Click the link to learn more about how a mice infestation gets started and grows – and how you can end it!
You can follow a simple 4-step plan to get rid of “cellar-dweller” mice:
- Clean your basement thoroughly, removing old junk, debris, and clutter. And clean contaminated surfaces with bleach water to disinfect. Also clear away weeds and debris on the outside of the house.
- Inspect and seal. Find cracks/holes in the foundation or floor and seal them with cement patch or a ball of steel wool. Also seal up any inviting openings on the exterior perimeter of your house.
- Don’t forget to put weather stripping on your basement door to keep basement mice from graduating to “all-house mice.”
Door Sweeps - Set traps along the basement walls, bait them with peanut butter, and check them daily for several weeks. Use plenty of traps and move them around if they aren’t catching anything where they’re at.
Even after you’ve rid your basement of mice, that smell may still continue. Click here to learn how to get rid of dead mouse smell.
What Can I Do About Mice In Between Floors?
Let’s say you wake up one night to the sound of scratching noises emanating from somewhere between your home’s first floor ceiling and the second floor’s floor. Likely, it’s a mouse problem. But what can you do about it?
Besides floors and ceilings, mice also often get inside of walls. One way to catch them is to drill a small, nickel-sized hole in the drywall, a few inches up from floor level. Then, tape a box with a baited mouse trap in it over the hole. But click this link to learn more on how to get rid of mice in walls.
Don’t ignore mice between floors. They can mess with your insulation and chew on wiring, which could cause a short or even an electrical fire.
What to do? First, clean rooms on both floors the mice can access from their central “layer.” Then use any of the strategies listed in the next section below.
Ways to Get Rid of Mice Under Floorboards
Here are some of the best ways to get rid of mice under your floorboards:
- Block all entrances you can find except the one(s) you place the traps near.
- Take up a floor board, tile, or otherwise open up one area of the floor, and set traps in and around that opening. Be sure you know how to put your floor back together again!
- Try sonic mouse repellents. It might jolt and annoy them enough to push them out of the floor to where you can more easily exterminate them.
- Use peppermint oil (which mouse hate) to clean your floor surfaces. If the floor already has a hole in it, through which the mice got in, pour peppermint oil into that hole as well.
You obviously don’t want to have to take up your whole floor to get the mice, so it’s worth experimenting with these methods first and then calling in a professional mouse hunter if all else fails.
Mice Under the House
Mice “under” the house, as in inside a crawlspace, is a major threat. From those spaces below, they can come up into your floorboards or into your walls and invade your whole house.
The means of eradicating crawlspace mice are about the same as for in other areas:
- Clean up all mess and debris.
- Seal off all entry points.
- Eliminate all food and water supplies.
- Set traps along the perimeter where mice will find them.
Cleaning up a crawlspace is a dirty, dingy job you won’t look forward to. But unless standing water is eliminated along with bugs, snails, and other attractive mouse-foods, mice will want to live there – especially if they have lots of clutter to hide behind and plenty of nesting materials available.
Mice Out of Your Ceiling
If mice are in your ceiling, they are likely in your attic too. And you probably will have to venture up into the attic to successfully eradicate them.
Mice like to hide under insulation in corners and eaves or make their nests alongside ceiling joists. This gives them extra protection, they think, but it’s up to you to prove them wrong.
But don’t think mice in your ceiling will just stay there. Click here to find out about how mice can climb, to better understand how they get into your attic/ceiling and may be able to climb down to forage and back up again.
To rid your ceiling of unwanted mice, set traps in the attic along ceiling joists, in abundance and often side by side or end to end. Set traps next to each other facing opposite directions to catch mice while they’re “coming or going.”
Put traps at any obvious ceiling entry points, near pipes, and inside ceiling voids or drop ceilings.
Check traps once a day or as often as possible. Get rid of dead mouse carcasses only while wearing gloves since mice carry harmful diseases.
Add new bait as soon as old bait is gone, or, is just getting too old and stale to attract mice anymore.
Best Ways to Get Rid of Mice in the Ceiling
What kind of traps are best used to get rid of mice taking up residence in your ceilings?
While preferences vary, here are 4 key points to keep in mind:
- Poison baits and bait stations aren’t best for ceiling mice. Why? Because you don’t want dead mice to be decomposing somewhere in your attic or inside your ceiling – but you can’t find them!
- Snap traps are the most popular method for killing ceiling mice. And they do work well. But there are other options too, so don’t limit yourself.
Live catch traps often come in shapes that would be hard to place along ceiling joists and are too expensive to put there in large numbers. But homemade live-catch 2 liter bottle traps could work.- Small electrocution traps that kill suddenly are humane and easy to use in attics. Some brands are inexpensive enough to use in quantity too.
A mouse in the house is always a problem, but when they are hidden away in tight, hard to access locations like attics, ceilings, walls, under floorboards, or under the house in the crawlspace, it’s a bit more challenging to get rid of them.
But don’t give up. The same basic methods used to catch or kill mice anywhere are still used for ceiling and basement mice and the like. It may take venturing into a little-used attic, basement, or crawlspace, and it may take a little longer to get rid of the mice and verify they’re really gone.
But it can and often has been done. It just takes a little effort, ingenuity, and patience.
