As anyone who has had a mouse in their home can attest, mice can cause an enormous amount of damage to household items. Now try locking them in a room alone with their household items for months on end. They can chew through boxes, make nests out of clothing, squeeze through tiny openings, slippery scales on nearly vertical paths. There doesn’t need to be food to attract mice—they’ll just dig their way in for the sheer joy of shredding a rare first-edition book or tunneling through your new leather sofa/loveseat combination. The only household items that are safe from these terrors are plastic toys.

So what can you do if you need to store your household items in a self-storage facility for a period of time? You can package all your products in those plastic containers you can buy at Walmart, even the most tenacious mouse probably won’t go through one of these. And even then, the little rodent would only have access to a box of his goods as he starves to death now toothless and in pain. Make sure the storage drive installation you are using has a mouse reduction program. Mice reduction can work quite well, but it really needs to be distributed throughout your installation to work well. Therefore; the programs that work are the ones that can generally be seen by customers, like poison blocks in every unit, or metal mouse traps on the edges of every building, or five-gallon buckets that are used as traps at the ends of buildings. If you don’t see signs of a mouse reduction program, it’s likely that the self-storage facility doesn’t have one.

What other options do you have, a mouse-proof installation? Do they really exist? Yes, there are, and the ones that are mouse-proof are usually dust-proof as well. On these types of units, if you don’t bring a mouse with you when you move into the unit, then the mouse can’t get in. These units are generally based on the shipping containers that cross the ocean from China on a ship and are sealed steel containers with a weather, dust and mouse proof compression seal around the door. When the door is closed it breaks the weather seal around the edges using a 20 inch pry bar on the door latch when the door is closed properly nothing goes in or out of that storage unit until it is opened again .

Of course, there are those who say they are mouse-proof, but don’t look around the unit if there are gaps between one unit and the next big enough to slide 4 stacked credit cards. Even in ceiling joists there are mouse roads and if storage facilities have them, they had better have a mouse abatement program.

So watch what you’re doing and you can really avoid storage drive terrors.