What we wish we’d known about.. rats

Just want you want to know is in your house..

So we’re not entirely sure how they got in in the first place but it’s definitely to do with the building work we were having done and gaps around steel beams that were not filled by the builders. 

It’s likely that they crawled up from the sewers as until the toilets are fixed in place, the waste pipes are open holes to the sewers. Check whether your builder has put any rat prevention device into the waste pipe to prevent this from happening. As it was, our waste pipe emptied out into our hallway for a significant period of time so in hindsight, it wasn’t even that surprising. 

How it started

In case it’s ever useful, this is how we knew!

  1. We first knew we had rats (and / or mice.. yes it’s true, the exterminator made very clear that they can in fact live side by side.. great) when we started to find the droppings, as we weren’t living in the property at the time. 
  2. The second sign was when I found a chewed electric cable just under one of the sockets. We also had a 4 way damaged cable which meant that one of the 2 way switches to the kitchen wasn’t working. 
  3. The third sign was when a mouse dropped / fell from the top of the staircase behind me as I was walking down the corridor in January about to leave the house, squeaked, stupid thing probably didn’t mean to fall, then scurried under the ground floor floorboards directly below. That was pretty grim.

What we did

I laid a bunch of traps I got from DIY shops, online etc. but nothing seemed to work and at one point one of the humane traps seemed to just walk off under the floorboards never to be seen again which was.. very creepy. 

Eventually we got the council exterminator in who laid down poison everywhere. He also discovered we had a leaky stop cock which was likely to attract them. Rats apparently only need shelter and water to move in. So got the plumber over and fixed the stop cock. A ton of the initial bait disappeared so there must have been a few of the buggers. 

The aftermath of dead rats

A few days later though, and what we hadn’t been told would be a consequence, was large flies started to appear in the reception room which we realised was from under the floor. Eventually we also realised this was likely from the decaying corpse of a / several dead rats. Lovely. The BEST part was we had no doors yet so they could move around the rest of the house at leisure and torment us in other rooms where we were living, such as the bathroom and bedroom. They were very large and they just kept coming.. I got an electric fly zapper and left it in the reception room at night and in bed you could hear it sparking every time it got another one. This was after I’d killed dozens of them during the day with a rolled up local paper.

Then what happened

Later on, another live electric cable in the new extension also became grounded and kept tripping the circuit so we had to get the electrician back to reroute the circuit but we were aware that it was a time limited solution and could easily get worse if the rodent kept gnawing at the wires and we ran out of work arounds which would mean unsightly channels down the newly plastered and painted walls. 

Eventually the flies died down and the running claws across the ceiling of the extension subdued. It was really difficult to get to them if they weren’t at the stop cock as they were in the ceiling and walls of the extension and there was a horizontal steel beam in the way so you couldn’t really see or follow the wires. So make sure your builder blocks up these holes at the right time before it’s too late. 

I also tried to pump expanding foam around all the accessible gaps in the kitchen (where I could get to given the kitchen had already been installed). We’ve been told rats are likely to return during winter seeking shelter and that Victorian houses are notorious for having street mice that wander freely between the houses so we’re keeping an eye on it and may need to get the drains gassed (to check for any entry points) but hoping the worst is over.

 

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