Almost everyone in the ACCCC puts his or her car away for the winter.  For some, putting a car away for the winter is as simple as driving into the garage and closing the door.  For others, there is an elaborate winter storage ritual.

(more to follow here)

Rodents

While your pride and joy is safely stored away for the winter, you need to protect it from another evil: mice.  These creatures love to make a winter's nest in the safe confines of your stored vehicle.  There are a lot of theories as to how to prevent mice from making a nest in your car.  Some theories involve chemicals while others involve traps or predators.

Some people swear by dryer sheets.  They put a few sheets inside the car and the sheets drive off the mice because the mice can't stand the smell.  Others recommend moth balls instead of dryer sheets.  However, the moth ball odor takes a long time to dissipate and passengers in a a moth ball protected vehicle will smell of it even after a short ride.

Mouse traps are great for trapping the hungry rodents.  The clamshell traps are quite effective at trapping them and mice trapped in a clamshell are easier to dispose of compared with those trapped by a traditional mouse trap.  Besides cheese, bacon and peanut butter also make good bait to attract mice.  As with food, it will eventually spoil to the point where even mice won't be interested so periodic maintenance is a good idea.

The best method of keeping mice out of your car is to keep a cat around it.  Mouse traps work well to catch mice when they wander into it but there is no guarantee that they won't make a nest in your car first before they get caught.  Cats, on the other hand, catch mice instinctively and seem to relish the chase.  As predators, they protect your car from mice proactively and you generally don't have to wait for the mouse to find the cat.

The only downside to having a cat is having to protect your car from the cat.  Cats, by their nature, always love to perch in high places, which will invariably the hood or roof of your car.  Even though they seemingly have soft, padded feet, they also have very sharp claws that aren't automatically retracted because they are walking across your fresh paint or even your all-original 70-year old paint.  You can try to train your cat to stay off your car but you will probably have more luck telling the sun not to shine.

You can either keep yelling at the cat to get off the hood or you can find a better place for the cat to rest.  The best method I have found so far to simply put a heated cat bed in a high and cat-accessible place.  You don't need much to make it accessible because cats are excellent climbers and jumpers.  You'll find that the cat prints on your hood will all but gone once you have one of these things. 

Besides their love of high perches, cats, by their nature, like to see what's going on in the world outside.  If you don't have a perch beside the window, your cat will perch on the nearest best thing, which will likely be your car.  If you make it soft and warm (old scraps of carpeting will do), your cat will have no reason to rest on your car when it has a much better place beside the window.  These are easy to make but ready-made window perches are easily available.