Rodent Control Services in Ottawa Hills, Grand Rapids

Brick houses from the 1920s

Many homes here are Tudor Revival, Colonial Revival and similar styles with brick or stone walls, slate or tile roofs and full basements. The brick holds up well, but the mortar joints, window wells and the spots where wood trim meets masonry all age. Mice need only a quarter inch. That is the point where Grand Rapids Rodent Control starts: we look at the house as a set of seams, not as a brick box.

Basement window wells are a regular entry point. Leaves collect in them, the frames rot, and mice slip in behind the glass.

Oaks, acorns and the autumn rush

The big oaks and maples that make these streets so attractive also drop a lot of food. Acorns feed mice, chipmunks and squirrels heavily in the fall, and a good acorn year can mean more mice looking for warm places as temperatures drop. The rush usually starts around October and builds into early winter.

We have seen years where a single Ottawa Hills street produced several calls in the same week, all with the same story: quiet all summer, then scratching in the walls as soon as the nights got cold. Timing your sealing before that rush is the easiest way to stay out of it.

Leaf litter piled against the foundation gives mice cover right up to the wall. Clearing a strip along the house helps.

Chipmunks are part of the picture too. They dig shallow tunnels beside front steps, patios and garden walls, and while chipmunks rarely move indoors, their tunnels can loosen soil and leave gaps that mice later use. We do not trap chipmunks, but we do note where their digging has opened a path to the foundation so the gap gets closed.

Garages, breezeways and service doors

Because the neighborhood was built for the car era of the 1920s, many lots have a garage tucked behind the house or joined to it by a breezeway. Those connections are often later additions, framed in wood and set on a thin slab. Where the new framing meets the old brick, there is a seam, and mice find it.

Older houses here may also have a side service door into the basement or a milk-delivery box in the wall by the kitchen. Plenty of those have been painted shut or covered over, but not always sealed behind. A small flashlight and a few minutes usually tells us whether one is part of the problem.

Up in the attic

Larger attics with old insulation can host mice for a long time without much noise. Signs include droppings near the hatch, tunnels through the insulation and chewed paper backing. Mice often reach the attic by climbing inside walls or along vines and downspouts outside, then entering at roof returns or gaps in the eaves.

If the insulation is badly soiled, we recommend our attic cleanup after trapping and sealing are done.

Some of these attics were finished into bedrooms or studies decades ago, which leaves short, closed-off spaces behind the walls at the eaves. We check those through any access panel we can find, since a finished attic can hide nesting right beside a room people use every day.

Weak spots we check on these houses

• Basement window wells and their frames
• Mortar joints at the sill and around utility lines
• Gaps where a porch or sunroom meets the brick
• Roof returns and eaves on Tudor-style gables
• Garage doors and the seams of attached garages
• Chimney chases and old vent openings

On these homes, the list above covers most of what we find. The tricky part is that several of them can be active at once, which is why we check every one before sealing anything, rather than stopping at the first hole we see.

Sealing that fits the house

We use materials that hold up and look right on an older brick home: copper or steel mesh packed into gaps, mortar patches that blend with the existing joints, and metal flashing where wood is weak. Our exclusion page explains our methods in more detail.

We avoid spray foam on the outside of these homes. It looks out of place against old brick, it weathers badly in Michigan sun and cold, and mice chew straight through it. Where foam is useful, inside a rim joist for air sealing, we back it with metal so it cannot become a doorway.