Pest Control in Hendon's Shared Houses and Student Lets
A house let by the room works differently from a family home. Five or six people keep their own hours, buy their own food and bring their own furniture, but they share one kitchen, one set of bins and one building. Pests do not respect the lock on a bedroom door, so a problem that starts with one tenant rarely stays with them.
The kitchen everyone uses
A shared kitchen has more cupboards than any one person looks after, more food in them than anyone keeps track of, and a cooker and fridge that are hardly ever pulled out. Crumbs under the units and an open bag of rice at the back of a shelf are enough for mice. Where several tenants cook late at night and the bin fills faster than it is emptied, the kitchen becomes the busiest room for pests in the house as well as for people.
Food kept in bedrooms
Tenants who share a kitchen often keep snacks, cereal and bottled drinks in their own rooms to stop them going missing. That moves the food supply upstairs. A mouse that finds biscuits in a wardrobe has no reason to stay in the kitchen, and droppings in a bedroom are usually the first sign that this has happened.
When the Summer Changeover Comes
Student tenancies near the university tend to end in early summer and start again in September. In between, a house may stand empty or half-empty for weeks, and that gap changes everything for pests.
- Bins left full on the day the last tenant moves out stay full until someone collects them
- Food forgotten at the back of cupboards is left for the whole break
- An empty house is quiet, so mice and rats move about undisturbed
- Flea eggs left by a previous tenant's pet can lie in the carpet until new people start walking on it
A walk round before the new tenants arrive is worth the time: check the kitchen cupboards and behind the cooker, look along skirting boards in each room, and make sure the bin area has been cleared.
Furniture that moves in and out
Each changeover brings mattresses, bed frames, sofas and desks, some bought second-hand and some left behind by the tenants before. Second-hand beds and upholstered chairs are the most likely way for bed bugs to arrive, and a mattress dumped in the front garden for weeks before collection can be carried back in by someone who likes the look of it. Checking seams and joints before a piece of furniture comes through the door costs nothing.
Who Arranges Pest Control in a Shared House
If you rent a room, report the problem to your landlord or letting agent first and put it in writing, with the date and what you have seen. Your tenancy agreement may say who is responsible for pest control, so it is worth reading. Where a university or a managing agent runs the house, contact them in the same way.
If you are the landlord, remember that each room is let separately but pests treat the house as one building. A pest found in one room may already be in the next, and tenants do not always report things quickly, especially near the end of a tenancy. Telling everyone in the house what is happening, and when someone is coming, makes access to each room far easier to arrange.
Family houses and flats
Away from the lets, Hendon's semis and terraces have the same run of pests as the rest of north-west London's interwar streets: mice in autumn, wasps under the eaves in summer and squirrels in lofts backing onto the trees of Hendon Park and Sunny Hill Park.
