this is my rv and inside of this rv i have a full-on mouse infestation it's
never happened to me before but i think because i've been sitting in the same place for a while
i was just too attractive and i thought it was gonna just be one mouse and it wasn't
so today i'm going to tell you about what happened how i found out i had mice
and a whole bunch of products there behind me that i've tried out to mitigate the problem or
get rid of the mice and i'm going to tell you what worked back there and what didn't
happy sunday everybody it's robin with creativity rv i hope you're all doing well
out there as you might know i've been spending some time in my fifth wheel on a rural property
and in just a couple of days now i'm headed out to travel in my truck camper
well like i said i've never had mice inside of my rv before but i'll tell you i have found a couple
of dead mice before one time it was in my first or second little rig and i opened up an outside
storage bin and there was a little mummified mouse stuck in the rubber like it was trying to
get in or maybe it was in the basement and it was trying to get out but it got stuck in the rubber
and it was so gross i had to like grind it out of there with a stick and after that one time
i had a water leak here in the fifth wheel and when we crawled in and removed the wall
over where all the plumbing is there was a little dead mouse in there so i thought okay maybe they
can get into the underbelly into the basement but i never really thought they would come
into my rig first of all since i've been on the road i've put irish spring bars inside of
all of my pantry areas in my cabinets and in the basement and i've tried the dryer sheets
and i've tried the little electric pulse things that you plug in and i have a cat but then about
three or four weeks ago i went out to help jump something and i opened up the hood of my truck
and right there where i put my hand in to pull the hood up was the little tiniest cutest baby mouse
you ever saw in your whole life but what started to bother me was it just didn't even care that i
was there it wasn't scared i was screaming at it i was like hitting near it with the jumper cables
and it didn't even want to go away this little guy is just hanging out he's not even scared of
me and he keeps getting into my car engine of course i kept my hood open and i ran the engine
every day but even though i did that there were mice all around the truck i found them under
the tires just underneath the truck every day and they did not care that i was near
them at all well fast forward just a couple of days and i was in here working one night
and the cat was running around behind me but he does that you know he wants to play after
sleeping all day all of a sudden he ran over to his food bowl which is right underneath this desk
and he just kept staring at his food bowl and i thought oh god no please don't let there be
a mouse back there and sure enough he chased something the size of a squirrel from underneath
this desk to underneath the reclining chairs and look i'm pretty good with critters and bugs
but i screamed it is just not what you want to see inside your rv especially something that size well
after that the cat was kind of useless he just kept looking under the chair and crying get it boy
no
why are you so scared get the mouse
and look i'm gonna give him a pass because usually my cat spends his time like this
or like this and he is old and i'll tell you he's a badass um chaser
not so much a badass catcher of mice which actually is okay with me i'd be happy if
he kept them away a little bit more but you know mice carry diseases and i don't want them
to bite him and i don't want them to have any fleas that jump on him or jump on me
they are not something that you want to have around you guys may have seen a video that
i did a year or two ago where the cat was lost and we couldn't find him and then we heard him
in the subfloor below the bedroom then we figured out that below my stairs over there where there's
a shoe cubby if you actually bend down and look up through the cubby there is a total
exposed hole there where the cat was crawling up through there into the subfloor and playing around
well we were able to lure him out with some wet cat food here is a quick screen grab of him
coming out from under the stairs well it looks like that little hole in the stairs is where the
mice got into the house itself so the first night i tried to set a little trap with a bowl and some
peanut butter so the bowl would collapse on the mice and of course that didn't work
and i was up all night long hunting on amazon for products and doing research and hearing the cat
down here tearing around and in the morning by the way my patrons got a live play-by-play where i had
not slept and i told them what was happening well i couldn't wait for the amazon products to come so
i got some regular snap traps at the dollar store and some paper bags to set traps
because my dad gave me this great trick because he grew up on a farm i set the traps up so they were
inside of a paper bag i used peanut butter as bait and that way if it catches a mouse
all you have to do is wrap up the bag and throw it away well unfortunately those traps did not
catch any mice but a few days later i got my amazon products and my friend jason was here
the guy that helped me install my composting toilet last week and he helped me look for ways
that the mice were going to get in and you guys are never going to believe what i found inside of
this fifth wheel there is a big compartment where one would normally put a generator well apparently
there was an exhaust pipe that was pre-installed in that compartment for the generator but when the
guys installed the solar they took it out but never filled the hole so you guys might know
that mice can fit into the tiniest little spaces even the size of a pencil eraser so we filled that
hole and i'm going to show you how we did that when i go through these products then we went on
the hunt for more holes and look we found a couple that maybe they could have gotten into but there
were also holes in my rv that i couldn't fill like this one where the slide goes in oh no what part
yeah but we can't seal that right you can't fill that with steel wool or some kind of a foam
because the gears have to be able to go in and out then i emptied out my entire
basement full of storage and we removed the wall and looked up where that hole
was going into the stairs and it turns out that we could not block that the way that i wanted to
oh yes oh my god it's massive we thought first of all that we could just put a board up there
but it looked like that hole was there for a reason like airflow between the basement and
the actual house because we found another giant gap underneath my pantry so this big hole went
all the way along but you had to really get inside the basement and crane your neck up to even see it
i have a hole oh you're kidding you saw that from the basement yeah
i found a solution for that finally and i'll share it with you here in just a second
but meanwhile i set out some no kill traps and i actually caught my first mouse well i just checked
my trap and i caught one but i checked the trap a little too late cause he's dead but at least we
know the trap worked and so i'm gonna take him to a dumpster and clean this out and reset it
this trap was inside the house i don't know if you can see back in there but it actually caught
a hornet or a wasp back in the corner of course it didn't trigger the trap but this was
inside under the stairs so i'm glad it caught this thing too apparently it will catch more
than mice we filled the holes i had traps out and the cat was on guard so i thought that i was okay
but then about a week later i was sitting in my chair and i was on the phone with my mom
and i hung up and i heard a scratching sound on plastic now look after the first night i flipped
the recliners over and like scrubbed everywhere down there every crumb every little spill drink
everything because i did not want that to be attractive to the mice and i thought oh my god
there's one under the chair again so i flipped the chair over and i didn't see anything about
half an hour went by and i just could not get over it so i went back and i really took apart
both of the chairs and the centerpiece and flipped them all over and down inside of one of the gears
right in the corner there was a little peanut
sized baby mouth so i don't remember if i kicked him or i screamed or he just
got scared because of the chairs but he tore out and went back under those stairs
and of course you're probably thinking now what i was thinking which is
i have a freaking nest i did not catch it fast enough and probably underneath that subfloor
underneath my bedroom is a nest of mice and then i went out to drive my car and i saw this
the little [ __ ] ate part of my dashboard this means war one of the not so fun facts
about mice that i've learned is that their teeth never stop growing so that's why they
are constantly nying on stuff so they'll not on your wires they'll not on your plumbing
they'll not apparently on a dashboard because they're trying to grind down their teeth
oh my god a couple of my patrons told me stories about snakes they got into their rvs because
they first had mice i don't want any of that i don't want the snakes i don't want squirrels
i don't want mice i don't want terrible spiders i don't want any of that so i am going to go nuclear
on these mice and i'm going to carpet bomb my rv so that when i get this thing back out of storage
hopefully it won't have an infestation and then i'm going to take my favorite products over
into the truck camper so let me go through what products i used and what i think worked the best
the first thing is this no kill trap now you can see back here
you put in a source of bait and this door just comes up right here so that you can fill it
and they recommend that you use peanut butter but peanut butter didn't work for me in my regular
snap traps i did catch one mouse in one of these with peanut butter but it just dried out really
fast and didn't seem that appealing and i wanted to find something that would work when i left here
that would still attract the mice if they were inside
so i did a bunch of research and i made basically a trail mix for the mice that has oats and nuts
and little crumbled up cheese nips and some dried fruit they also like chocolate but it didn't have
any chocolate so how this works is when they walk in here like this they hit this little
counterbalance and the door shuts the next thing i did is i bought a giant box of irish spring
like i don't know if this worked before but i never had mice when i swapped these out like every
couple of months underneath my counters they don't like the smell of the peppermint and i'll tell you
when i came to use this fifth wheel out of storage i forgot to do it so the bars that i had were like
a year old i think they worked before they have a really strong scent that is not unpleasant so
i'm doing a bunch of these now i don't know if this worked very well at all unless you
have allergies and this is a great thing because behind me you'll see some vicks salt bath crystals
i had that in the house for like two years and never used it so i dissolved some of the
bath crystals that have like eucalyptus and mint and cedar and all those things they don't like
i have these little cotton tubes that you get at the dentist that i use for painting so i put those
into a hot bath with the vicks and immediately you know they dry out so i don't think this
works great unless you have allergies and then oh vicks that works for that but not so much for mice
do not use this if you're going to be in the same house with this product look when i looked on
amazon i was in a desperate state but i still didn't want to buy anything like this because
you think the scent doesn't last too long in these little satchels and you wonder if it's
the most cost-effective way well let me tell you when i first got this i made the mistake of first
opening up the bag and taking a big whiff and i almost puked i'm not joking no exaggeration and
then still after that bag of rocks i reached in with my bare hands and got two of these satchels
out the smell is the worst smell i've ever smelled in my life yeah it kind of smells like a mint
but more like something curled up and dyed inside of that mint now first i put one of these right
underneath the stairs and i put the other one underneath my pantry and i was gagging gagging
for like three days so then i took some tongs and i took them and put them in the basement storage
and now the smell is still wafting up here and it smells disgusting in my house
i swear if my neighbors come by and they don't see me for a while they're going to
think somebody's dead in here but i'll tell you i am going to be putting every satchel in here
all around the basement of my rv like the second before i leave with probably a mask on and some
tongs because i cannot imagine that they are going to want to be anywhere near this for a long time
this product i actually do recommend now let me tell you what we did about the holes
first i got a foam spray that they call a pest blocker because it's got something inside of
the foam that they don't like to eat we stuffed some steel wool up into the hole
and then we sprayed this foam into the steel wool the reason we use both is because if for
some reason they're so anxious to get in that they want to chew through that foam they cannot chew
through the steel wool for that hole underneath the stairs i have ordered some galvanized steel
screen it's going to be here right before i leave so i'm not going to be able to film that part for
you guys but you can cut it here's a picture of it and you have to get galvanized steel because
mice will eat right through screen material it's a little more expensive most of it comes with a
quarter inch hole but i wanted something smaller so i got an eighth of an inch and i'm going to
cut it and i'm going to staple gun it up all the way around so they can't get into the house
even if they get into the basement this is a little motion sensor solar powered alarm that is
supposed to scare off the mice when they get near the underbelly of your rv now i'll tell you when i
went to courtside last year i was in la posa south for about five days in the long-term visitor area
and it looked like a rave out there because so many people have flashing lights underneath their
rv personally i didn't want to do that all night because i think the mice might get used to it but
also because you know i'm boondocking by myself i don't want to draw attention to myself at night
this i think is okay because you can charge it with a usb or just charge it for an hour a day on
the solar and then there are a bunch of different settings there's actually an audible alarm
which i won't use because it peels your skin off or just a light that will go off all day
or just during the night and here's what it looks like you press this little button in the back
that's setting one this is setting two see how it flashes twice i like setting four anytime anything
in its radius comes in front of it these lights flash they flash and it's not something that
the mice can get used to i'm actually going to set these up upside down on a tin stick
with zip ties inside of these little screw holes i broke down and got some glue traps after those
mice ate my dashboard i'm going to tape one inside of my engine and i'm actually going to keep one
taped on my dashboard until i know they're gone and i'm gonna put probably 20 of them all over
this house they'll catch the snakes they'll catch the spiders and they'll catch the mice
so when i come back here next year i might have a bunch of traps full of
mice i hope not i hope that the satchels and the irish spring and the lights do the trick
but i'll let you guys know when it happens i hope you have found this video helpful if you have a
tip to get rid of mice that i have not mentioned here please do put it in the comments below
i'll see you guys next week until then everybody have happy travels out there and be free
you