Reply With Quoteif you had to open the cupboard to notice it, then just leave it. smell will go after a while anyway.
Hi All,
After some pest related advice here. I have just moved into a new place and it is a convert 200 year old barn out in the country. One of the cupboards in the bedroom (which is in the loft space) is open into the roof/loft. There is no access but there is a load of insulation, beams and general nooks and crannies. Basically only a mouse could fit in there!
Opened the door today and there is the most god awful smell, it is a dead mouse. I have smelt it once before many years ago in another converted farm house we lived in and luckily it was easy to find back then but it is a smell you never forget and quite astonishing for such a small animal!!
The issue I have is it could be anywhere, in the wall, in the roof space in one of the endless little spaces that I can't get to or see. So the question is what the hell do I do? It may be the worst thing I have ever smelt and it can't be good for us sleeping in that........
I have called pest control but can't see how they are going to be able to do anything because there isn't any access. They are going to come and have a look but I am guessing they will just charge us for the call out and not be able to do much.
Anyone have any bright ideas or solutions I haven't thought of? (I am way out of my comfort zone here by the way!)
Thanks!!
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if you had to open the cupboard to notice it, then just leave it. smell will go after a while anyway.
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
Try some reverse logic, if it was dead in a cupboard it's because it couldn't get out,
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action."
'Populism, the last refuge of a Tory scoundrel'.
Once it's gone crispy i doubt it'll smell much any more. Unless it's something much bigger that's sealed up in there. Any suspicious disappearances in the area?
Had the same problem a couple of times and a combination of one of these ambi-pur things and the odd application of an odour neutraliser will hopefully make it liveable for the 2-3 weeks it smells. Plus seal up the cupboard.
just hope its not a rat!!!
Put some bait on trays in the space. Most of the shop-bought stuff is pretty useless but at least it will be an indicator if you have a larger problem. If the bait is kibbled (nibbled away with the husks still present), it's mice. If it's all gone, it's possibly a rat problem. If the only indication you have is the smell, it will fade away as whatever causes it dries out. Then you may get maggots and flies. Then frogs and locusts leading to you having to sacrifice your first-born.
Unwanted visits by rats and mice have been the bane of my life for years.
Get a catOriginally Posted by Dunce
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
A hungry homeless cat
Yes, definitely get a cat.
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We live in a very old thatched cottage. The thatch attracts mice and the occasional rat. We get the local pest control out and they will put out bait stations, so occasionally we get a dead ‘un, mostly in inaccessible places.
The smell will reach a crescendo, but that typically only lasts a day or two.
You get to learn to live with it.
If you have crevices and places you can’t get to then the last thing I’d be doing is putting down any bait/poison, better to put down some snap traps.
Throw the mouse in the bin.
You live in a 200 year old converted barn in the country. You will get mice from time to time.
Did you read what I wrote? If I could get to it I would happily throw it in the bin, I have no way of getting to it or finding it.
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I have a car in the country and it's got mice in it. :-(
R
Ignorance breeds Fear. Fear breeds Hatred. Hatred breeds Ignorance. Break the chain.
I was clearing the cupboard under the stairs one day, and under a pile of polishing rags was the perfectly preserved, virtually mummified, body of a mouse. We'd had mice the previous year and suffered the almost sickly sweet smell of decomposing rodent, but never found the culprit. I turned the place upside down at the time, going behind cupboards, lifting floorboards and moving the fridge, freezer, washing machine and dishwasher out in the desperate search to get rid, but failed. How I'd missed it in that cupboard I'll never know.
We've got a cat now so no longer get mice, thank Christ.
Our mouse problem took off the day we introduced a cat. She knew that she was meant to catch them but didn’t know that she wasn’t meant to bring them home alive. Now that her mousing days are over (she’s nineteen) things have settled down although I did find a dead one the other day in one of the shoes I keep at the top of the cellar steps.
As others have said, the smell won’t last for long.
The smell is just bacteria digesting the mouse. Once they've had their fill, the smell will go. Unfortunately, the colder weather might prolong the bacterial lunch because they will metabolise more slowly.
No need to thank me...
http://forum.tz-uk.com/showthread.ph...-Getting-a-cat
If you don't know,where the dead mouse is then you will just have to wait till To stops smelling....if you are lucky you,won't get a load of flies as it decomposes.
As to other mice there is nor much you can do if you live,in the country. Probably the best advice is to get a cat or two.
The clouds of well nourished flies will indicate the remains are now inert, but the flies are unpleasant. I check our traps daily as the missus took exception to the bastar*s.
Holy pussy?
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Think yourself lucky you don’t know where it is! My friend in his wisdom decided that as he had a broken shoulder he would quickly entomb a dead squirrel that was under a shed in expanding foam. Stupid i know but to him it seemed like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately when i tried to get it out of the foam it fractured into many pieces. The smell from the foam of rotting squirrel was one if the worst i have ever smelt, truly disgusting.
Nothing to add about locating the mouse corpse but I do have a similar story.
I used to work in an old converted mill house in Yorkshire. As young enthusiastic things we used to work late into the night and often would get phantom bin movement from the little buggers picking through the takeaway detritus. One Monday we came in to the office to be greeted by the most god awful smell, you're right, once you've caught a whiff of dead mouse you'll never forget it. The smell lingered for weeks and despite increasingly animated searches we didn't discover the stinky remnants until months later. One of the PC's in the office eventually failed and upon opening it up we discovered a crispy mummified mouse carcass spot welded to the PC's power supply. How it got in there or why the PC didn't keel over immediately from whatever it presumably chewed and electrocuted itself on I'll never know.
Good luck with your mouse hunt, I sympathize with your situation but finding the little sod will probably prove fruitless. My recommendation is to put a long life air freshener in the cupboard and open it as little as possible until the smell is gone.
Get a smell meter and set it on the sensitive setting. It'll lead you to the source..
Thanks for all the advice chaps, I have decided to just seal up the door, use an ambipure and some air freshener until the god awful smell goes away...... Just hope its not too long!
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Make a strong bleach solution.
Get one of those garden sprayer pump operated things with a nozzled rod.
Spray the bleach solution into all the nook and crannies of the effected area. Hopefully you will drench the corpse in bleach. This should kill the stench very quickly. Bleach is much better than decomposing flesh.
You should find that the smell will go and as the corpse dries out it won’t reek. I think it saponifies or something.
Avoid over spraying and obviously avoid spraying it anywhere where the bleach will damage something. This usually works fine as long as the bleach is diluted .
I think you’d be better airing it out. If its damp it will stink for months.
Problem I find is that they bring in too many live ones, who make a run for it and end up dead and crispy in the eaves..
Depends on the cat
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
Always found cats to be pretty useless. They were no help.
Noticed immediately that having a dog tends to stop vermin from ever entering the house.
If you adopt a cat that has lived outdoors for a while instead of being pampered and overfed by humans all its life, you'll find that it will eat the mice it catches.
For a while we used to have some mice problems, and mole rats (hamster-like rodents) that destroyed a lot of our vegetables in the garden, young trees etc. - they eat the roots from below, can even destroy meadows that way. We had two old 'urban' cats that did not catch much. When we gradually adopted 'wild' ones that had been born and at least grown up partially outdoors, the rodent problem was taken care of. We now have an anti-rodent special forces unit of six cats who all hunt and even in our garage where we store bags full of grain for various animals there is not a mouse in sight. Yes, they carry rodents indoors - to eat them. If one manages to get away for a few seconds the poor animal is cornered by at least three feline monsters, and a few minutes later I can clean the remains of the crime scene off the tile floor. I still prefer that to finding food stores ruined and full of mouse shit.
An added advantage is that the cats are cuddly. Once they killed the vermin they come lie in your lap to digest. ;-)
According to my son the mice or RATS as he claims are back in my house :( Not had a peep for well over a year, said that he heard the familiar gnawing in the ceiling in his room, was loud enough this morning to wake him.
I thought I had plugged and filled everything but the critters have once again somehow found their way into the roof space, roof space which is a single story extension which I can't get into or access.
Previously we've put down traps in the roof space I do have access to and they've somehow managed to get there and be trapped but it's a slow and drawn out process.
Have you tried introducing snakes into the roof space?
Don't you mean Slow Worms?
Could be Squirrels ?
Storing their nuts in your attic?
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