Walk the Outside From the Ground Up
The useful list is made standing in the garden rather than sitting indoors, and it is made low down. Almost everything worth closing on a house like this is within a metre of the ground, behind something that has to be moved first. The most common entry points is a good list to walk round with.
Air bricks, and what has been built up against them
These bricks keep air moving under a timber ground floor, so the answer is never to stop them doing it — a broken grille is replaced with a sound one, or covered in a way that leaves the air moving. What is particular to a big house is how many there are and how many have disappeared: a patio raised over the years, a planted bed built up against the wall, a garden store put up in the 1970s. Stopping rats at air bricks covers the options.
Waste pipes, the boiler flue and the condensate
Every improvement to the back of the house punched through the brickwork: a utility waste, a downstairs shower room, a boiler moved onto an outside wall with its flue and a plastic condensate pipe, an outside tap, cable for broadband or an aerial. Each sits low, usually behind a bin or a planter, and each was cut oversize. Proofing pipe and utility gaps describes how those penetrations are closed.
Garage doors and the joint at a rear extension
An up-and-over door has a line along the bottom where the building stops and the drive begins, and the ground moves while the door does not. The side door beside it has a threshold that has been walked on for fifty years. At the rear, the place where a flat extension roof or a lean-to meets the original wall opens up as the two settle at different rates, and the gap sits above head height where nobody thinks to look for it.
The Top of the House: Loft Hatch and Eaves Storage
Deep eaves mean storage, and a converted loft means eaves cupboards behind the knee walls with the original roof space still there on the other side of the door. Inside the house that is small work: sealing the openings where pipes and cables rise into the roof, and fitting a hatch that closes properly instead of resting on its frame. It keeps a problem in the roof space from becoming a problem on the landing, and it is worth doing whether the noise up there turned out to be mice or something heavier.
What is on the outside of that roof is another matter. Fascia, soffit, verge tiles and flashing are a roofer's work at roof level, and they are what squirrel control in Dollis Hill ends with rather than anything included here.
What the Hour Covers, and What It Does Not
The service is £180 for up to one hour of work on small, reachable holes. On a house of this type that realistically means a damaged air brick grille or two, the openings around a few waste and heating pipes at the back, the foot of a garage or side door and one or two things indoors. How much is finished depends on the number of openings and on whether they can be got at without taking a kitchen apart.
Some of what people ask about belongs to another trade, and saying so early saves everyone time: rebuilding loose brickwork, rehanging a dropped door, making good where an extension roof has pulled away, and anything at roof level. Drains sit outside it altogether — a defective pipe is surveyed with a camera and then repaired or fitted with a one-way blocker by a drainage contractor, as rats and drains explains.
Treatment First, Then Proofing
Proofing follows treatment; it is not an alternative to it. Close a route that is still in use and the animal cuts another, usually somewhere less convenient, or dies in a void that cannot be opened up. Book rat control or mouse control in Dollis Hill first and the proofing once things have gone quiet. Before or after treatment gives the reasoning, and which holes are actually being used helps you tell a live route from an old one.
Booking Proofing in NW2 and NW10
What to tell us
Say whether it was rats or mice and when the treatment finished, whether the address is a house or a flat in a divided one, and run through what you already know about: air bricks you can see are cracked, pipes coming through the back wall, the garage doors, the extension joint, the loft hatch. If a patio or a bed has buried the air bricks, mention that when you book.
Clearing the way
Move bins, planters, stacked pots and bikes off the back and side walls, cut the growth along the base, and unlock the side gate. Indoors, empty the cupboard under the sink and clear the floor of the garage and the utility. A gap that cannot be reached cannot be closed, and an hour spent shifting boxes is an hour not spent sealing.
After the work
You will hear which openings 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 has been sealed, tell us. Rodent Proofing Brent covers the same work across the borough, and Pest Control Dollis Hill has the other pests in the area.
