How a Rat Gets Into the Back of an Interwar House
Walk round to the back of one of these houses and count the openings: the air bricks low in the brickwork, the holes where the kitchen and bathroom waste pipes pass through the wall, the worn threshold under the back door, the side of a garage, whatever is left of an old coal bunker. To a rat working along the base of a wall after dark, testing each one in turn, they are the only doors that matter. How rats get into a house covers the routes in general; what follows is the version for this kind of property.
Air bricks and the floor void
The air bricks near ground level keep the timber ground floor dry, so they have to go on passing air whatever else happens to them. A cracked one, or one whose clay has crumbled at a corner, opens straight into the void beneath the floorboards, and that void carries on under every room on that floor. It is the reason a scraping noise under the front room can begin at a broken air brick beside the back door. Where rats nest indoors describes the spaces they pick once they are under there.
The garage side door, and the door into the house
Nearly every one of these houses has a garage, attached along the flank wall or built in beneath a bedroom. An up-and-over door sits on a concrete threshold that seldom stays true, and the side or rear door into the garden is usually older than the house's own back door. A garage is also where bird seed and bulk pet food get stored. What makes it serious is the second door, from the garage into the kitchen or the hall: once that bottom edge has worn, an animal that reached the garage has reached the house.
Waste pipes, coal bunkers and the outside store
Where a waste pipe leaves the brickwork, the hole was cut oversize and filled with mortar that has since shrunk back, and the same goes for a heating pipe or cable added later. Old brick coal bunkers, lean-to stores and porches are often part demolished or stacked with garden things, and the dry dark space under a rotten timber base is a few paces from the kitchen wall.
Signs Indoors Rather Than in the Garden
- Dark tapered droppings along a skirting board in the back addition or the under-stairs cupboard
- Greasy smear marks where a pipe passes through a wall, often behind the washing machine
- Gnawed packaging on a low shelf in the garage, or chewed sacking on the garage floor
- Heavy scratching beneath the floorboards once the house is quiet, rather than up in the walls
- A gnawed corner at the bottom of the door between the garage and the house
The first signs of rats shows what those look like close up. Droppings about the size of a grain of rice belong to something smaller, so mouse control in Neasden is the booking instead, and running overhead in daylight points to squirrel control.
What to Do Now, and What to Leave Alone
- Move bird seed, pet food and anything edible in the garage into metal tins or thick tubs
- Stand the bins on hard ground away from the back wall and keep the lids closed
- Write down where and at what time you hear activity — it is the most useful thing you can hand over
- Leave the air bricks alone: stuffing one blocks the floor void's air and pushes the rats elsewhere
- Keep shop-bought poison out of the garage and garden, where a pet or a child can reach it
Booking a Rat Visit in NW10 and NW2
What to tell us
When you book rat control, say whether it is a house or a flat, whether there is a garage and whether it opens into the house, and which room the noise is under. If the address is a shop, a warehouse or a trade unit rather than a home, say so, because business premises are quoted per site.
Getting ready
Empty the cupboard under the kitchen sink and the under-stairs cupboard if droppings have turned up there, and make sure the garage, the side passage and the path along the back of the house can be walked along. Boxes stacked against a garage wall hide the brickwork that needs looking at.
Afterwards
You will be told what was found and what happens next. How long the whole thing takes depends on the property and on the route the rats were using, which this guide to timescales explains. Get in touch again if fresh droppings appear after a quiet spell.
Closing the Back of the House Afterwards
Treatment settles the rats that are in the building; the openings they used are exactly where they were. Small accessible ones — the hole around a waste pipe, the gap beside a garage door, a broken air brick — are the work of rodent proofing in Neasden, while a fence with daylight under it or a shed on a collapsed base is a builder's or fencer's job. Rat proofing sets out what actually lasts. Where the garden backs onto an embankment or a road verge, the land itself is not going to change, and Pest Control Neasden covers what that means for the boundary. For the borough as a whole, see Rat Control Brent.
