Wildlife Exclusion & Animal Proofing in Middle Tennessee

The Full-Home Exclusion Process

1. Find every door — including the ones nothing has used yet. To find where animals are getting in, we go over the structure the way a squirrel would: from the shingle edge down. Ridge vents, gable vents, every run of soffit and fascia, chimney crowns and flashing, plumbing stacks, utility and HVAC penetrations, gutters and downspouts, window wells, garage-door corners, deck and porch skirting, foundation gaps, and — because this is crawlspace country — every crawlspace vent, hatch, and duct chase under the house. An animal in your soffit is the entry we find most, but squirrels in gutters and birds nesting in downspout corners are close behind, and they're the ones other outfits walk right past.

2. A photographed scope, priced before we touch a tool. Everything we find goes into a written scope of work with pictures of each opening and one firm number. You read it, you ask questions, you decide. The job you sign is the job you get — the price doesn't grow while we're on the ladder.

3. Seal what's sound. Rebuild what isn't. Each opening gets closed with the material that particular animal can't defeat: fitted metal and galvanized mesh against teeth, screened vent covers where the house still needs to breathe, exterior-rated sealants where a gap just needs to stop existing. Chimney cap installation in heavy stainless steel handles the flue, and buried barrier mesh stops the diggers at decks, porches, and sheds. Where chewing or rot has ruined the wood itself, patching would be malpractice — we cut the ruined run out and frame it back in fresh or composite stock. And no, we do not own a single can of that unsightly orange foam.

4. Make it disappear. The last step is the family signature. Every repair is trimmed, caulked, and painted to the lines and colors the house already has, because a seal-up you can spot from the driveway is only half finished. A spray company's answer to wildlife is a recurring appointment; ours is carpentry — change the house, and the problem stops being a subscription. Pre-winter is the smart season for this work in Tennessee: close the building in October and the November cold snap sends the squirrels and mice to somebody else's attic.

Two Questions Every Guarantee Has to Answer

Every company in this business says the word "guaranteed." Before you believe any of us, ask two things and make whoever's bidding answer in writing.

First: how long — and can I read it? A verbal promise, or six months on a sticker, tells you how long the company expects its own materials to hold. Our answer is a 10-year written guarantee, and the reason we can offer a decade isn't confidence — it's construction. Work that's framed, fastened, and flashed correctly doesn't need a short warranty to hide behind.

Second: does it cover the house, or just the holes? Read the fine print on most exclusion warranties and you'll find a short list of sealed points — and nothing else. New opening two feet over? New invoice. On a comprehensive seal, we guarantee the building. If wildlife gets into a home we've fully excluded, we return and we make it right, and it costs you nothing. That's the whole clause.

Wildlife Inspection for Home Sale or Purchase

Nashville's market moves fast, and fast closings are how wildlife problems change owners without changing addresses. A general home inspector works a checklist built around plumbing, panels, and foundations; almost none of them get into the insulation, put a ladder against every soffit run, or read the grease staining a bat colony leaves at a roof return. So the guano, the chewed wiring, and the raccoon-fouled crawlspace stay off the disclosure — not from dishonesty, but because nobody qualified ever looked.

That look is what we sell. A wildlife inspection from us covers the attic and the crawlspace for droppings, staining, nesting, and damaged insulation, plus the complete exterior review we'd run before any exclusion job — roofline to foundation, vent by vent. Middle Tennessee's housing mix earns the scrutiny: a fifty-year-old Crieve Hall ranch, a pre-war East Nashville bungalow, and a tall-skinny finished eleven months ago all hide entirely different problems, and the new build is not the safe bet people assume — builder gaps at gables and rooflines are one of our most common calls. You get every finding photographed in a written report formatted for the transaction file.

Sellers use it to fix problems on their own timeline, or to disclose from strength instead of getting ambushed by the buyer's inspector. Buyers use it to price repairs into the negotiation — or to keep earnest money away from a house with a colony in the ceiling. If the report turns up contamination, our Attic & Crawl Space Cleaning crew remediates it and documents the work for closing.

A Donelson homeowner heard heavy movement over the garage and found a soffit return pushed open at the corner — classic raccoon work, all shoulder. She went into a live trap that same evening, and a careful check of the void turned up no kits — so we reframed the crushed run and skinned it in new vented panel. Because a raccoon that's opened one corner has already tested the others, we reinforced the remaining returns on the same elevation before painting everything back to the trim color. Covered under the written guarantee.

On a century-old house near downtown Franklin, decades of weathering had opened seams along the fascia that a Bat Removal inspection traced to an established colony. Historic trim demands a lighter touch: we sealed the surrounding roofline first, ran one-way devices over the active seams, and once the colony had exited on its own, restored the fascia with milled-to-match stock instead of modern substitutes. The house kept its face; the bats lost their lease.

Gray squirrels had worked a soft spot at the shingle edge of a Green Hills home into a commuter entrance directly over a bedroom. After Squirrel Removal trapping cleared the residents, we opened the edge up, replaced the compromised decking, shingled it back into the existing roof, and wrapped the vulnerable line in metal flashing — the one material squirrel teeth give up on. The rest of the roof edge got the same flashing preventively, so the next soft spot never gets discovered.

An Inglewood bungalow had a mouse problem that three rounds of traps hadn't dented, because the crawlspace was restocking the walls: two vent screens had rusted through and the hatch no longer sat square in its frame. Our Rodent Removal trapping ran alongside the fix — every vent re-screened in heavy-gauge mesh, the hatch rebuilt to close tight, and each plumbing and duct penetration under the floor collared in metal. The walls went quiet within the week, and stayed that way through winter.

Browse the full Photo Gallery for more before-and-after exclusion projects across Middle Tennessee.