The Doors at the Bottom of a Block
Walk round the base of a canalside block and it is mostly doors: refuse store, cycle store, plant room, the entrance to the undercroft, a service cupboard, sometimes a door onto the courtyard that is only used by the gardeners. All of them are in heavy use, all of them are close to either food or shelter, and they are the first thing worth looking at before anything indoors. The most common entry points is a useful list to have in your head first.
Brush strips, thresholds and door bottoms
A brush seal along the bottom of a store door has a working life. The bristles comb sideways, thin out in the middle, or get torn where bins are dragged across them, and the strip stays screwed in place looking exactly as it always did. Add a closer that no longer pulls the door the last inch, or a leaf that has dropped on its hinges, and the gap is continuous along the whole width. Gnaw marks on the bottom rail tell you it is already in use, and what size gap a rat can get through puts the measurements in perspective.
Service penetrations around and above the stores
Where pipes, ducts and cable trays leave a store and pass into the rest of the building, the opening cut for them is always bigger than the thing going through it. Extract ducts, drainage from the flats above, incoming water and electrical containment each make their own. Proofing pipe and utility gaps covers how these are closed without sealing in moisture or blocking a vent that has to stay open.
Inside your own front door
The list in a flat is short: the holes around the sink and appliance waste pipes, the top and bottom of any boxed pipework, the gap behind the kitchen plinth, and the threshold of your own entrance door onto the corridor. Stopping mice getting behind kitchen units explains why the kitchen tends to be the busiest part of that list.
Communal Parts Are the Building's to Arrange
This is the point that stalls most jobs in a block. A resident cannot instruct work on a store door, a riser cupboard or a courtyard wall, however obvious the gap is: those belong to the freeholder, and in practice the managing agent gives the go-ahead. So report it with a photograph and a date, ask who is arranging it, and book what is yours to book in the meantime. A single job done across the ground floor of a block achieves far more than six flats each sealing their own kitchen.
Air Bricks and Back Doors in the Older Streets
In a terrace or semi away from the water the openings are the traditional ones, and the rule with air bricks is that they must go on ventilating. Never foam, tape or render one over: the void under a timber floor needs that air, and closing it invites damp and rot instead. A cracked or missing grille is replaced with something that still passes air, which is what proofing at air bricks describes. The rest of the back of the house is the gap where a waste pipe leaves the brickwork, a worn back door threshold, a side door into a garage, and the joint where a later extension meets the original wall.
What Fits Into the Hour
The service is £180 for up to one hour of work on small, reachable holes. On an Alperton job that might be two or three pipe entries, the threshold of a back door, a cracked air brick and the openings under a sink, or in a flat the kitchen and bathroom penetrations and a door threshold. Anything that cannot be reached without taking a kitchen apart cannot be done in the hour.
Larger work belongs to another trade and you will be told so plainly: rehanging or adjusting a dropped door, anything involving a fire door and its seals, rebuilding loose brickwork, roofing, or a drain repair after a camera survey. Sealing the wrong thing is worse than sealing nothing.
Treat First, Then Proof
Proofing follows treatment rather than replacing it. Close a hole that is still in use and a rat or mouse gnaws a fresh one, usually in a worse spot, and anything shut inside a floor or a duct will make itself known soon enough. Book rat control or mouse control first and proofing once things have gone quiet — before or after treatment sets out why that order is not arbitrary.
Booking Proofing in HA0
What to tell us
Say whether it was rats or mice and when treatment finished, whether it is a flat or a house, and which openings you already know about. If the property is a flat, say which parts of the building are communal, because that decides what can be worked on at all.
Getting ready
Clear the cupboard under the sink and any access panel, move stored items away from the walls and doors you want looked at, and have the fob or key ready for a store, a gated courtyard or a parking level if the agent has approved work there. Nothing that cannot be reached on the day can be worked on.
After the work
You will hear which gaps were closed and what needs a builder, a roofer or a drainage contractor. If droppings or fresh gnawing show up near something that was sealed, get in touch: telling a live hole from an old one is not always obvious. Rodent Proofing Brent covers the borough-wide picture, and Pest Control Alperton has the other pests in the area.
