Pest Exclusion Sealing for Garages

Sealing Is a Measurement Job

Exclusion sounds like a matter of stuffing things into holes. It is not. It is a matter of finding every place along a moving perimeter where the gap has grown past about a quarter of an inch, and then closing each one with a material that suits that particular opening.

The quarter inch figure is where it starts, because that is roughly what a house mouse needs. A roof rat, which is the animal we deal with most often in Long Beach, needs something closer to half an inch. Neither of them is squeezing through a keyhole. They are getting through gaps that are plainly visible if you stand inside the closed garage in the middle of the day and look at the bottom edge.

Where the Gaps Actually Are

The bottom seal fails at its ends, not in the middle. The astragal is a length of rubber or vinyl held in an aluminum retainer, and the last few inches at each corner are where it works loose, curls up or tears off entirely. That corner is also where a settling slab opens up, so the two faults compound.

The side jambs are the second place. The vinyl stop that the door closes against is nailed to the timber jamb, and on garages of a certain age it has either been painted into uselessness or is missing on one side because it got knocked off by a car door years ago.

Then there is the header, the small triangular gaps behind the track brackets, the hole somebody drilled through the block for a hose bib or a conduit, and any wall vent that has lost its screen.

What We Fit, and Why

For the bottom edge, a new astragal in the correct retainer profile, cut long and seated properly at both ends. Retainers themselves split with age and salt exposure, and a new seal in a split retainer is a job that lasts a season.

Where the slab has moved, a bonded threshold seal is usually the honest answer. It is a raised vinyl strip glued to the concrete that the door closes onto, and it bridges a gap that no amount of seal on the door will ever reach, because the problem is the floor rather than the door.

For openings that are holes rather than gaps, galvanized hardware cloth in a quarter inch mesh, cut oversize and fixed properly, or copper mesh packed in and mortared over. Expanding foam does not appear on this list. Rodents chew through it easily and then use the tunnel.

What Sealing Will Not Do

It will not remove anything already living in the building. Seal a garage with a nesting population inside it and you have made the problem worse, not better, so we look for evidence first and will tell you plainly if the order of operations needs to be trapping and then sealing.

It also will not fix a bottom section that is bowed or rotted. If the panel itself is no longer straight, no seal follows it, and at that point you are choosing between a section replacement and a new door rather than between seals.

The Coastal Angle

Salt shortens the life of everything on this list. Retainers corrode, fixings weep rust and the pressure of the seal against the slab drops off faster than it would inland. Within a mile or two of the water, a bottom seal is not a twenty year part.

Book It

Call (562) 689-5506. We will walk the perimeter, tell you which gaps matter and which are cosmetic, and quote the ones that actually let something in.