Your Own Front Door, and Everything Past It
A flat above a parade is a home inside somebody else's building, and the boundary in the lease usually runs along the plaster rather than around the whole structure. Knowing which side of it a hole sits on saves a wasted hour. The most common entry points is a useful list to walk round with.
What can be closed inside the flat
The list indoors is short and nearly always productive: the openings around sink, bath and appliance wastes, the notch where a heating pipe drops through a floor, the top and bottom of boxed-in pipework, the gap behind the kitchen plinth and the threshold of your own entrance door onto the landing. Stopping mice behind kitchen units explains why the kitchen is the busiest part of it, and proofing pipe and utility gaps covers how the penetrations are closed.
The stair, the yard and the shop below
Everything else belongs to the building: the street door and its threshold, the stairwell, the meter cupboard, the rear yard and its gate, the shop's own back door and roller shutter. A resident cannot instruct work on any of it however plain the gap is, so report it with a photograph and a date to the freeholder or managing agent, ask who is arranging the work, and book what is yours in the meantime. One job done properly at the bottom of a building is worth more than four flats each sealing their own kitchen.
Air Bricks and Thresholds in the Terraces
Air bricks that have disappeared behind decking
An air brick keeps air moving under a timber ground floor so the joists stay dry, and it must go on doing that — foam, tape, mortar or a bin bag over one trades a rodent problem for damp and rot. A cracked or missing grille is replaced with an intact one, or covered so air still passes freely. What makes these houses different is how often the air bricks have vanished: a deck, a raised patio or a bed built up against the rear wall buries them, stopping the ventilation and hiding the hole at once. Stopping rats at air bricks sets out the options.
Back doors, patio doors and the step at an extension
The back of these houses collects thresholds. A timber back door with a softened bottom rail, patio doors on a rear extension whose track sits proud of a step, a side door into a store, a cat flap left in a door nobody uses any more. Each has a line along the bottom where the building stops and the ground begins, and the ground rarely stays where it was. What size hole a mouse can get through is worth reading before you decide a gap is too narrow to bother with.
What the Hour Covers, and What It Does Not
You are paying £180 for an hour on the small holes that can be reached and closed properly. On a flat that might be the kitchen and bathroom penetrations, the open end of some pipe boxing and a door threshold; on a house, two or three pipe entries at the rear, a damaged air brick grille and the foot of a back door. How much gets finished depends on the number of openings and whether they can be reached without taking a kitchen apart.
Some of what people ask about belongs to another trade, and saying so early saves time: rehanging a dropped door, anything involving a fire door and its seals, rebuilding loose brickwork, a shopfront or a shutter, and work at roof level. Drains are outside it altogether — a defective pipe is surveyed and then repaired or fitted with a one-way blocker by a drainage contractor, as rats and drains explains.
Treatment First, Then Proofing
Sealing is the step that comes after a treatment, never instead of one. Close a route that is still in use and the animal cuts another, usually somewhere less convenient, or dies in a void nobody can open up. Book rat control or mouse control in Cricklewood first and the proofing once activity has stopped. Before or after treatment explains the reasoning, and which holes are actually being used helps you tell a live route from an old one.
Booking Proofing in NW2
What to tell us
Say whether it was rats or mice and when the treatment finished, whether the address is a flat or a house, and which openings you already know about. In a flat, say which parts of the building are communal, because that decides what can be touched at all. Book proofing with that on the record and the hour goes on sealing rather than on working out ownership.
Getting ready
Empty the cupboard under the sink and any access panel, and pull stored things away from the walls and doors you want looked at. Outside, move bins and planters off the back wall and cut the growth along its base. If decking has buried the air bricks, say so when you book.
After the work
You will hear which gaps were closed, which were left and why, and what needs a builder, a roofer or a drainage contractor. If fresh gnawing or droppings turn up beside something that was sealed, tell us. Rodent Proofing Brent is the borough-wide page, and Pest Control Cricklewood has the other pests in the area.
