A Common Kitchen Ingredient Is All You Need To Keep Mice Out Of Your Home

Despite being thought of as cute and cuddly throughout our collective childhoods, mice are not welcome guests in many households. It's all fun and games being an animal-loving Disney princess until you catch one of these tiny, furry beasts scurrying around in your home. Not only are they destructive, eating their way into your food storage, destroying appliances, and causing property damage, but mice are also disease vectors and can pass on terrible illnesses through direct contact with them or indirect contact with their feces or saliva. Not to mention you'll probably have bags under your eyes from all that scampering in the night keeping you awake.

Fortunately, there is a common kitchen ingredient that is guaranteed to repel mice from your home: cinnamon.

These clever critters reproduce fairly quickly, so using cinnamon is a humane way of getting rid of mice without having to resort to genocide. If you suffer from an infestation and taking the chemical route with fumigation doesn't sound so hot, then you can choose the organic option to keep the pesky rodent problem at bay — while also keeping your environment smelling absolutely delicious.

Cinnamon is a widely available kitchen condiment that not only tastes great on French toast, but also can be used to drive away pests like mice. While the spice has a pleasing aroma to us humans, the reverse is the case when it comes to those furry rodents. What makes cinnamon so potent against mice is the strength of the scent: they can't stand it. Bad news for them, great news for you.

To repel mice, you can use either fresh cinnamon or cinnamon oil. According to Hunker, you can tie together bundles of fresh cinnamon sticks in a pouch and leave them at strategic locations in the house, especially where food is kept. If you have cinnamon powder, you can also tie it up in sachets or sprinkle it around.

If you want to use cinnamon oil, then this helpful hack by TikTok user @maryquilter1213 will do the trick. Gather as many cotton balls as you need to cover the key areas in your house and saturate them with the oil. Leave them in those areas to shield them from mice. Another upside to this is that you get to deodorize your house at the same time, since cinnamon is a natural air freshener. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.