Reinsulating entire house/mouse control
Hey, I haven’t been here in three years. Could use advice. In 1970 I built my house out of all old wood and beams. Old barn wood, old chestnut. Last week I took a piece of barnwood panelling down whilst installing a wall heater, and discovered that mice had nested in the insulation bats, effectively collapsing the bat so that 2/3 of the cavity was completely empty. Since there is no way to eliminate mice here in the Southern Appalachians — I kill mice all year, and still they sometimes get into the walls — I was thinking about taking off all the panelling and using some kind of rigid blown-in insulation. I figured that even though mice could chew through it if so inclined, they wouldn’t use it as cozy nest material and totally destroy it they way they have the fiberglass. I saw the spray/expandable kind blown into the cavity on a home-improvement show years ago. Is that stuff still being used? Is it decent for my purpose? Thanks
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Somebody knowlegable about insulation will be around, but I recommend snakes for the mouse problem, I think in your area the major rtodent-eater is called a chicken snake. Find one - you might offer local kids a reward - and put it in your attic. It will live happily there, you will never see it, and it will gobble up all the mice.
I am totally serious about this. I lived in an old house in Tennessee that had one, (actually, the only way I know was finding the cast skins in the attic, intertwined in the FG), & we had NO rodent problem.
Support your local reptiles!
Sorry to hijack the thread, but any mid-westerners here know what snake I should attract to my house to rid the mice? (suburbs of Chicago)
Any subspecies of the Vyrdolilak snakes should do fine. LOL (it's a Chicago thing people).
Any subspecies of the Vyrdolilak snakes should do fine. LOL (it's a Chicago thing people).Y'mean Fast Eddie Vrdolyak? ;-)
Edited 11/3/2005 5:16 pm by Rebeccah
Oh man .... ya gotta put the word 'snake' in the thread title so certain people (eg, ME) can avoid reading this stuff ...... arghhhhhhhh
I'm sure your idea has merit, but if I found a snake skin in my attic the house would be sold to the highest bidder the next day.
Oh, sorry - forgot about some folks' visceral reaction to the legless reptiles...hope it didn't ruin your evening!
There are things called CATS which when allowed to get a little hungry will typically thin out the local mouse population.
And the average house cat is a bit more fun to pet than your average reptile.jt8
"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." -- Ronald Reagan
More people are allergic to cats than to snakes. If my attic didn't get so cold in the winter (not too cold for mice, though), I'd go the snake route.
Snake will burrow down in the insulation to where she's comfy, & wake up just often enough to snack from time to time...
Ok but being cold blooded won't that snake feel a warm draft somewhere and head down to the living area? I am doing a remodel of a house we just bought and found a curled up garder snake (dead) about a foot long in one of the walls. Must have gotten in but could not get out.
Jeff
It's been my experience that they don't come into the living area - where I've seen them is in old stone cellars, & that Tennessee attic. That one tunnelled around in the blown fiberglass, which was over a foot thick, & just went down to the top of the ceiling to get warm, The insulation did not appear to be harmed, & we loved the lack of rodents.
They really don't like to be very close to people & domestic pets!
My DH & I were a little weird in liking knowing she was there. (I know it was she from examining the cast skin; it's not hard to tell.)
The one that expired in your wall may have eaten a poisoned mouse? They are pretty slick about moving around in tight spaces. Think what you could do if you could tape a string on & send it where you wanted to run wire!
Mice, as you well know, need very little room to get into your walls. A common entry point is the holes drilled through plates for wiring and plumbing, etc. In old houses, some of these holes were pretty generous and never caulked.
If this is what's going on, a few tubes of urethane caulking will do the job (foam, like "Great Stuff" is not so great because rodents will chew through it and use it for nesting material).
Thanks. I will of course do this. My larger question has to do with an alternative to fiberglass bats which collapse when mice make their runs and their nests and borrow the material. I have seen some new type of insulation for filling the entire studwall cavities. (Not Great Stuff, which is just for filling small openings.) Can anybody tell me if this new sprayed in/on insulation is a viable way to insulate an old house?