The Gaps at the Back of a Harlesden Building
The rear elevation is where everything has been added over the years: waste pipes, cables, extract ducts, a store, a gate. Each addition made a hole in something, and several of them are easy to walk past. The most common entry points are worth knowing before you go out and look.
Yard doors, gates and bin store doors
A timber door onto a rear yard drops on its hinges over time, and the arc it wears into the ground leaves a gap at one corner. Gates warp away from their frame, and a bin store door that is propped or no longer latches is effectively open. The bottom rail is the place to check: gnaw marks there tell you the gap is already being used. The size of gap a rat can use is smaller than most people expect.
Shopfronts and roller shutters
Where a unit has a roller shutter, the shutter rarely meets the pavement evenly along its whole width, and the housing box above the window and the side channels each have openings of their own. There are usually gaps behind the fascia and signage boards too, and between a shop's suspended ceiling and the floor of the flat above. Anything on the shopfront itself belongs to the business or the building owner rather than to a resident upstairs, so that is who needs to arrange it.
Service pipes up the rear wall
Soil stacks, waste pipes from upstairs bathrooms, kitchen extract ducts, gas and electricity entries and later cable runs all pass through the back wall. The hole cut for each is normally wider than the pipe, and redundant pipework left in place after a kitchen was moved can be an open tube straight into a floor void. Proofing pipe and utility gaps covers how these are closed without trapping moisture in.
What You Can Close Off Inside Your Own Flat
If you rent or own a flat above a shop, the shutter and the yard are not yours, but a surprising amount is. Inside your own front door the openings that matter are where the soil pipe or waste pipe passes through the bathroom floor behind a panel, the holes left where old pipework was moved when the kitchen was fitted, the space behind and beneath the kitchen units, and the gap under your flat door onto the communal stair. Stopping mice getting behind kitchen units explains why that last one is usually the busiest route in the flat.
If you rent, it is worth telling your landlord what is being sealed, and where a gap turns out to sit in a shared part of the building, that part is for the freeholder or managing agent to arrange.
What an Hour Covers, and What It Does Not
The service is £180 for up to one hour of work on small, reachable holes and gaps: on a Harlesden property, perhaps a few pipe entries on the rear wall, the gap at the foot of a yard or store door and two or three openings inside a kitchen or bathroom. A gap that cannot be reached without taking the kitchen apart cannot be sealed in the hour.
Bigger work goes to the right trade: rehanging a dropped yard door, rebuilding crumbling brickwork, refitting a shutter, repairing a drain. You will be told plainly if that is what the building needs.
Treatment Comes First
Proofing follows treatment; it does not replace it. Close a hole while rats or mice are still using it and they gnaw a new one, often somewhere far less convenient, and anything shut inside a floor or ceiling void will make itself known. Book rat control or mouse control first and proofing once activity has stopped. Before or after treatment sets out the reasoning.
Booking Proofing in NW10
What to tell us
When you book rodent proofing, say whether you have had rats or mice, when the treatment finished, whether it is a flat or a house, and which gaps you already know about — the rear wall, a yard or store door, the bathroom pipe boxing, the kitchen. If the building has a shop unit below, say so, because it changes what is yours to seal.
Getting ready
Move bins, crates and stored items away from the back wall and the doors, unlock the yard, and clear the cupboard under the sink and any bathroom access panel. Anything that cannot be reached on the day cannot be worked on.
After the work
You will hear which gaps were closed and whether anything needs a builder, a roofer or a drainage contractor. If droppings or fresh gnawing turn up near a sealed spot, get in touch: telling a live hole from an old one is not always obvious. The borough-wide page, Rodent Proofing Brent, covers the pattern across Brent, and Pest Control Harlesden has the other pests in the area.
