Carpet Moths Around Skirting Boards in Hungerford: What Does It Mean?

Why That Strip Is the Honest One

• Nobody walks on it, so it is not masked by wear
• A vacuum head does not fit the angle, so a pre-viewing clean does not reach it
• Furniture can be removed but the edge cannot — clearing a house takes away the evidence under the wardrobe and leaves this
• It runs continuously round every room, so there is a lot of it and it only takes one stretch to be informative
• Fibre and debris collect there over years

What To Look For, In Order

1. A narrow band of thinning following the wall, paler or sparser than the rest of the carpet
2. Fine silky webbing in the angle, sometimes holding grains of debris
3. A sandy debris along the line, the colour of the carpet
4. Larvae or cases tucked into the gully — the colour of the carpet, which is why they are missed
5. Worse in corners, behind doors and in alcoves than on open runs

Crouch, use a phone torch held low and almost parallel to the floor. Raking light shows texture that overhead light flattens completely.

Where To Look, If You Only Get One Room

• The main bedroom, behind the door and along the wall the bed is against
• The corner of any reception room furthest from the window
• The landing, at the wall side rather than the banister side
• The stairs, at the outer ends of the treads
• Any room being used for storage

What It Tells You

• Damage along the skirting is the classic established pattern — months or years, not weeks
• Webbing and debris with no thinning still means activity; the carpet may be synthetic or a wool mix
• Damage in more than one room means it is a house problem rather than a room problem, and the scope is wider
• Nothing at all in three rooms is genuinely reassuring, more so than any amount of looking at open floor

And What It Does Not Tell You

It does not tell you what is under the carpet, in the loft, or inside the fitted cupboards, and it does not tell you what the seller knows. It is a two-minute indicator, not a survey.

What we can do is look properly and give you a scope and a figure. What we cannot do is advise you on the purchase itself — that is your surveyor and your solicitor, and neither of those is us.

Treatment starts from £220. If you have found something at a viewing and want to know the likely scope before you commit, tell us which rooms and what you saw.