A Walk Round the Outside of the House
Almost everything that matters sits at ground level at the back and side of the property, hidden behind bins, planting or stored bits and pieces, and easy to walk past for years without noticing. The most common entry points is a useful list to carry in your head before you start looking.
Air bricks
An air brick keeps the void under a suspended timber floor dry, which means it has to go on passing air whatever else is done to it. The trouble starts when the clay or cast iron cracks, loses a corner or works loose in crumbling mortar, and the opening behind it runs straight into the floor void. A damaged one is replaced or covered in a way that keeps the airflow, never filled, and proofing at air bricks sets out the options.
Pipe runs, old flue holes and vents
Every hole cut for a waste pipe is cut wider than the pipe, and the mortar packed round it shrinks back over the years. Then there are the later additions: a boiler flue, a cooker hood duct, a tumble dryer vent, and on a house of this age the redundant opening left behind a vent plate when a back boiler or a gas fire came out. Each is sealed around the thing passing through it rather than over a vent that has to stay clear, which proofing pipe and utility gaps describes.
Garage doors, side doors and thresholds
An up-and-over garage door is supposed to sit on its slab and rarely does after decades of frost and settlement: the concrete lifts, the door drops, and there is a finger's width of daylight along one edge. The side door in the passage and the back door into the garden wear at the threshold and at the foot of the frame. The one most often forgotten is the connecting door between garage and house, which is the step that turns a garage problem into a kitchen problem.
Inside: kickboards, the under-sink cupboard and the loft hatch
Not everything is on the outside wall. The plinth line of a fitted kitchen, the opening under the sink where the waste leaves the building, the gap at the foot of boxed-in pipework and a loft hatch that no longer sits snug in its frame all decide how freely a mouse moves once it is indoors. Stopping mice getting behind kitchen units explains why the kitchen is usually the busiest part of the list.
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 Kenton house that might be two or three pipe entries at the back wall, a cracked air brick, the gap under a side door and the openings under the sink — how many get done depends on how many there are and how easily each can be got at. Anything that cannot be reached without dismantling a kitchen cannot be done within the hour.
Larger work belongs to another trade and you will be told so plainly rather than have it squeezed into the hour: rehanging a dropped garage door, relaying a broken slab, rebuilding loose brickwork, replacing a rotten door frame, or repairs where an extension roof meets the house. A drain fault is a drainage contractor's job after a camera survey. A hole at the roof edge big enough for a grey squirrel is roofing work, not proofing, and squirrel control in Kenton explains how that runs.
If You Rent the House
A tenant can book treatment and can book proofing, but the fabric of the building belongs to the landlord, so a new garage door, brickwork, a door frame or roof repair is theirs to organise. Report what you have found in writing, keep a copy, and say where you think the rodents are getting in — the same evidence helps whoever ends up paying. Pest Control Kenton covers the landlord and end-of-tenancy side.
Treat First, Then Proof
Sealing a hole that is still in use shuts the animal inside the structure, where it gnaws a fresh way out — often somewhere worse — or dies where nobody can reach it. Book rat control or mouse control first and proofing once the property has gone quiet. Before or after treatment explains why the order is not arbitrary, and telling a live hole from an old one helps you point at the right ones on the day.
Booking Proofing in HA3
What to tell us
When you book rodent proofing, say whether it was rats or mice and when treatment finished, and list what you already know about: a cracked air brick, the pipe holes at the back, the garage door, the connecting door, an old flue opening behind a vent plate. Say whether the house has been extended and whether the loft has been converted.
Getting ready
Cut back growth along the base of the rear wall, move the bins clear of the brickwork, empty the strip along the garage wall, and make sure the cupboards under the sink and around the boiler can be opened. A gap nobody can get to cannot be sealed, and the hour runs either way.
After the work
You will hear which openings were closed, which were left and why, and what needs a builder, a joiner or a roofer. If fresh droppings or gnawing show up beside something that was sealed, say so. Rodent Proofing Brent covers the borough-wide picture, and neighbouring Queensbury has the same extensions and back-wall openings.
