Why Shared Houses Suit Mice
It is rarely that a shared house is dirty. It is that nobody owns the problem. Food lives in five places instead of one: bedrooms, the kitchen, the top of the fridge, a box under the stairs. Bins get emptied when someone notices. A takeaway box left on the side overnight is nobody's fault, and a toaster full of crumbs is everybody's.
Add a house that fills and empties with the university year, sitting quiet over the holidays with food left in cupboards, and mice get long stretches of peace. They settle in during a vacation and the returning tenants are the first to find the droppings.
Who Reports It and Who Arranges It
If you are a tenant, the first step is the same whatever the tenancy says: tell the landlord or letting agent in writing, with photos of droppings or damage and the date you first noticed. Keep the message. Do it once, as a house, rather than five times as individuals.
Who pays depends on the tenancy agreement and on what caused it, and we are pest controllers rather than legal advisers. The live guide to pest control for landlords sets out the usual position, and the rented homes page goes into who does what in an ordinary tenancy. What we can do is invoice whoever is paying, and speak to an agent directly.
One contact, one plan. Pick one person in the house to deal with the landlord and with us. Treatment goes wrong in shared houses when five people are told five slightly different things.
What the House Has to Do During Treatment
Bait and traps compete with whatever else there is to eat. If there is an open loaf in someone's room and cereal on the worktop, the mice have no reason to feed where they should. The treatment works much better when everyone agrees to a short list and actually keeps to it:
- No food in bedrooms while treatment is going on, including snacks in bags and drawers.
- Dry food in hard containers with lids, not packets and bags.
- Bins emptied every night, with the lid shut.
- Crumbs wiped from the toaster area, the hob and under the microwave before bed.
- Nobody moves, opens or picks up a bait station. They are locked for a reason.
Tell us at booking if anyone in the house has a pet, if a visiting child might be there, or if anyone living there is vulnerable. Rodenticide goes only into locked, tamper-resistant stations placed where people cannot reach them. Follow the instructions you are given on the day and pass them on to anyone who was out.
Timing Around Term
Mice do not follow the academic calendar, but treatment can. A house that is about to empty for the summer is a good time to start, because nobody is adding food and the proofing can be done without disturbing anyone. A house that is about to fill is a good time to finish, so the new tenants move into a kitchen with the gaps already sealed.
The price is a fixed £260, confirmed before anything is booked. What it involves, including how the visits work and any proofing, is explained before booking, which also makes it easy for a landlord to approve.