Homeless with the kids for Xmas because of bloody mice!

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Tefal said:
Can you not just fill every hole/under every floor/outside every wall/all over the attic with the most powerful mouse/rodent poison you can get?

you know the stuff that will leave piles of dead cats outside your house after a few days.


might not get rid of them but might keep the numbers down.
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The council already tried that mate, not quite to that extreme but they definitely went to town on it... the boxes and exposed baits are matted with rodent hair, but there isn't so much as a nibble missing from them. ;\

Rentokill made the analogy of dry porridge made with only hot water, to a Sunday roast. Which would you pick? The house is allowing such free access to and from outside that the mice are enjoying fine dining in the garden and the farmer's field, and coming home just to sleep, breed and wreck havoc. The poison isn't even really attracting them aside from, as I said above, the Eradibait which they seem to have confused with wood.

The pest guy says that for every 10 I kill, 20 more are moving in. He spent an hour surveying every nook, cranny and hole inside and out, and said he can clearly see that they are still 'pouring' into the house from outside. Bleurgh. :o
 
Fully understand the stress you are under and I do also understand the grossness factor too.

I set to work with an axe and a box of matches on a double bed that caught a dose of bed bugs many years ago. :D Felt wrong sleeping in it.
However money wasn't really an issue so it kind of didn't matter.

Having the prospect of losing everything as in your case, I wouldn't have been so brash and would try to save as much as I could.
A bulk order of Germgaurd would be placed and attacking everything feasible would follow..
The place would be awash with it :D

I think the time has come to rent somewhere that doesn't have mouse flaps instead of cat flaps.
 
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Scubascorpion said:
Fully understand the stress you are under and I do also understand the grossness factor too.

I set to work with an axe and a box of matches on a double bed that caught a dose of bed bugs many years ago. :D Felt wrong sleeping in it.
However money wasn't really an issue so it kind of didn't matter.

Having the prospect of losing everything as in your case, I wouldn't have been so brash and would try to save as much as I could.
A bulk order of Germgaurd would be placed and attacking everything feasible would follow..
The place would be awash with it :D

I think the time has come to rent somewhere that doesn't have mouse flaps instead of cat flaps.
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Yep, I think despite the initial 'misunderstanding' we're generally on the same page really. Don't forget though, we're on someone's floor at the moment and meanwhile we have nowhere to store our goods except in the house we just left. As I showed above with the pic, the damage is immense and literally doubling every 12 hours... by the time we've found a house, even if it's this week, we'll have nothing left but sawdust and shredded paper. :o

I've never been so tempted to 'burn it with fire' in my life. :D
 
JBuk said:
Can't they just fumigate the building?
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Rentokill reckon it'll involve much more than that. That'd be more the final step at the end, I think. They were talking about wizardry like UV tracking dust, poison dust (they run through it, then groom their fur and die), liquid bromadiolone over really tempting foods, stuff like that. But, as I said none of this is even worth attempting (certainly not cost effectively) until the building has been properly renovated and then proofed.

They were saying things like "garage rebuild", "new doors and frames throughout", "much new brickwork", "airbrick covers", "new pipework and lagging", "new kitchen", "new upstairs flooring due to absolute disrepair".. It's a BIG job. Until then more mice are moving in than can be killed. It's pointless expense for next to no visible results.

Meanwhile we're paying to run our "ex-house", incurring expenses for living in another house, plus extra travel (we're miles from school, shops, doctors etc now), and have the expense of moving when we weren't planning to. As I said, nightmare tbh.
 
The Funktopus said:
Just buy a cheap chest of drawers from Ikea, soak liberally in Brodifacoum and leave in the house. Then try and take some solace in the rodent slaughter that ensues. :D
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I'd make the landord eat it & take some solace in the landlord slaughter that ensues. :mad:

Feel sorry for you & your family that you had such a landlord. Needs to be taught a lesson & sued to bankruptcy.
 
In my old (rented) house I had an infestation of mice. I don't know how many there were, but sometimes I would see several at once just run across the floor from one dark corner to another. The droppings were getting everywehere... As with yours, the place was a bit of a tip, and really needed some modernisation / structural work doing. I tried traps (both humane and deadly), but they weren't really too effective.

In the end I got two cats (had been considering it for ages anyway), and low and behold, the mouse problem was gone within two weeks. I would find half-chewed mouse corpses lying around, as well as limbs and heads, usually left in a corner. There must have been at least 20 or so corpses, and who knows how many the cats actually ate completely.

Anyway, the moggies drove out the mice, and they never returned while I was living there. Quite effective predators really. I was living on my own though so I wasn't nearly as bothered about it as I would have been if I had kids to look after...



Edit: regarding your situation, you should really talk to the citizen's advice bureau. Your tenancy agreement will have a clause about the landlord being responsible for keeping the house habitable, and the opinion of a professional pest-control agent is that the house will not be habitable without major structural work. At the very least you are not liable for paying rent etc. As for the value of your possessions, well that's something you will need to talk to a professional about. The landlord can play hardball all he likes, but once it goes to the courts it won't mean a thing (and will, in fact, only work in your favour as you can paint him as unreasonable).
 
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we had a couple of mice last year tried rat poison , traps etc, they weren't falling for it.

In the end for some reason they decided to chew through the rat poison bottle to eat it :confused: and the other mouse got caught in the only trap that didn;t have any bate on.
 
Rainmaker said:
Yep, I think despite the initial 'misunderstanding' we're generally on the same page really. Don't forget though, we're on someone's floor at the moment and meanwhile we have nowhere to store our goods except in the house we just left. As I showed above with the pic, the damage is immense and literally doubling every 12 hours... by the time we've found a house, even if it's this week, we'll have nothing left but sawdust and shredded paper. :o

I've never been so tempted to 'burn it with fire' in my life. :D
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good man

If you were flush for cash, you could probably afford to bin everything and start again.

The people advising you to bin everything are doing so to cover their own back. Nobody wants to tell somebody that its safe to do something anymore because they know they can be held liable and sued if further down the line somebody finds out they were wrong.

But you're not flush for cash, you have a wife and 3 kids to think about and christmas coming up. Chin up and get yourself turned around. Start looking for another place and get some research done on cancelling your rent. I'm sure you'll be well within reason to cancel paying rent for a property a professional has ruled unfit for habitation.

Get yourself another place to rent, fight for your deposit back, and get sanitizing everything as much as you can. Stuff that is upstairs and hasnt really seen the mice will be right as rain after a good hot wash and a soak in some sterilizing solution.

Cultlery in the kitchen for example, I would bin. Especially if there has been mouse droppings in the draw where they are. Cutlery is £25 for 24 piece set from ikea and you're going to eat off this stuff so i wouldnt take the risk for the cost of stuff involved. Start assessing how much stuff costs to replace, and what you can afford to write off as lost and replace.

I know your situation is bad, but chin up, and dont let them grind you down !
 
Gerard said:
Cats are useless, we have 3 of them and they bring mice in, play with them and let them go. :mad:
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I guess it depends on the cats... One of mine had managed to bring up its kittens "on the streets" before it was found by the animal shelter (close to death by starvation but still...).

Anyway, it must have been used to hunting mice to survive, so moving in with me must have been like an all-you-can-eat buffet. As I said, the mouse problem disappeared within two weeks, and in that time I found a couple of dozen half-chewed corpses.
 
I know how it is with mice infestations as I had to be removed from a temporary property the council put me which was owned by a private land lord. I used to see the things running on the kitchen side, running under the washing machine, jumping out of the airing cupboard, zooming across the living room floor as my kids were playing and cluttering about under my bed as I tried to sleep. It was 'effin horrible.

In the end the council re-housed my family (partner and 2 small kids), but only after months of moaning and finally getting environmental health in on the situation. The landlord was a waste of time, calling in waste of space pest control and then trying to block up any mouse sized hole with expandable foam.

Just glad I got out of that **** hole, but luckily all my main items were fine. It was literally just the floors and kitchen side which they liked to p*ss and crap on. :D

Anyway good luck on getting something sorted, and I hope you can salvage some kind of Christmas. :)
 
Would someone explain why in the world you'd ever bin metal cutlery? Or anything metal, for that matter?

Haven't we been sterilising and re-using metal equipment in +hospitals+ for years...? I'm sure they don't throw away all their scalpals and stethoscopes and stuff... disinfect, sure.
 
Dude that's terrible. I wish you all the best in your legal action, it is truly disgusting how you have been treated.

I would also be looking to get that deposit back asap.
 
Thanks for the helpful and sympathetic replies folks, I'm taking it all on board. MrLOL, unfortunately in this case the upstairs is as bad as the downstairs. The beds, for example, now have 'runways' carved up the material sides in various places, where so many mice have been running up and down them so often. The mattresses and bedding are caked in droppings and stink of mouse pee now.

In the words of Rentokill "No room can be considered a safe harbour, I couldn't recommend anything other than abandoning the place if you hadn't already."

FoxExe, I'm sure the metal cutlery could be sterilised yes. But in practice would you seriously want to tuck into dinner knowing where they'd been and how caked in pee and crap they were every time you put them in your mouth? No thanks old boy. :p :D

We've already replaced some essentials (plates, cutlery) with bargain style sets but I made sure to keep the receipts. As for the rent (MrLOL), yes we've been advised by the solicitor at the council's housing team to withhold it forthwith until the situation is resolved one way or the other. We're paid up until the end of December anyway, so it's going to be a moot point - we hope to be in a new place by then.
 
Good luck, I hope you get it all sorted. Ignore the idiots, Great to say that 60 degrees kills 90% of human virii. What about the lethal 10% thats left? Like you say, pretty much everything is completely ruined.
 
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