I feel your pain, Lane, and hope that some day soon you'll get your car outa the shops for good. It's all part of the "sorting out" process, for sure.
In May of 2020 I had to pull 1/3 of the dash apart to get the heater blower out of my Nissan (which gets parked outside near the woods). I had to extricate a Mouse Condo from the squirrel cage blower. The cage is about 5" deep and 7"-8" diameter:
The whole process took about 4-1/2 hours and required the entire pedal cluster and some heater ducting be removed for access.
About a month ago, I noticed the blower rumbling again so, once more I tore into the under-dash to find that the blower was, once again, about half-full of Condo Carpeting. This time it took maybe 3 hours start to finish, AND my neighbor helped me fabricate some 1/2" mesh screens in the air intake snout to keep the little critters outside where they belong (you could see where they had gotten in through the air intake).
This past Saturday the blower started rumbling again, and this time I had it out in about an hour (I'm getting good at this) and it was about 1/4 full, so everything got vacuumed out for the third time. All I could think was that the mouse is camped out inside of the car somewhere and getting in to the blower through the heating ducts. So now I've got some mouse traps in all four footwells with good, stinky, Wensleydale cheese in them as bait. Wallace and Grommit would approve, I'm sure.
This time, I got to use the new lift, just to get it up a bit so I could slide in and out of the driver's footwell easier on my back to reach, literally, to the top of the dash/heater on the driver's side to access the blower. You''d think maybe they could have mounted it in the bottom where you could get at it easier, right? I was actually surprised at how well that went, but I was still pretty stiff the next day.
I ain't gettin' any younger, here....