Yes, and wall voids are one of their favorite spots. The space between your interior and exterior walls provides warmth, darkness, protection from predators, and easy access to the rest of your home through gaps around pipes and wiring.
Hearing scratching or rustling sounds inside your walls, especially at night, is one of the most unsettling things a homeowner can experience. If that’s what brought you here, trust your instincts. There’s a good chance you’re sharing your home with mice.
Mice love wall voids because they are the perfect places to build nests. The space is dark, and they’re nocturnal, so they like that. It’s also undisturbed, has a stable temperature, and is often close to food sources in your kitchen and pantry.
It’s not hard for mice to find their way into your walls. They can enter through small gaps in plumbing, electrical wire, and HVAC. From there, they can travel through the wall framing to reach nearly any room in the house. Once inside the walls, they’ll build nests roughly the size of a softball from shredded paper, insulation, fabric, cardboard, or anything else soft they can find.
Signs that mice are nesting in your walls include scratching or scurrying sounds at night, droppings near baseboards or in cabinets close to the wall, a stale musty smell in certain rooms, and small holes or gnaw marks near pipes and wiring. You might also notice that your dog or cat is fixated on a particular spot on the wall, staring or pawing at it.
The hardest part about dealing with wall nests is getting to them. They’re hard to reach and remove. Effective rodent control requires finding out how they get into your walls so entry points can be blocked with materials mice can’t chew through.
If you’re a Hopkinton homeowner and you’re dealing with mice in the walls, Mosquito Squad of Rhode Island can help. Mosquito Squad offers rodent control, and as part of it, a technician will inspect your home to find entry points and nesting areas, then come up with a custom plan to clear the existing population and prevent new ones from moving in.
