Do you have any idea what "just go rent somewhere else" actually involves? Just wondering really. A lot of people write that on these forums like it's something you can do easily at the drop of a hat in a day.
Homeless with the kids for Xmas because of bloody mice!
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Do you have any idea what "just go rent somewhere else" actually involves? Just wondering really. A lot of people write that on these forums like it's something you can do easily at the drop of a hat in a day.
I know I could, there's loads of places near me that I could rent immediately, considering their possessions are ruined they don't exactly need a moving van. I imagine someone with 3 kids and dogs is prudent enough to have savings for this eventuality.
With a few £k from suing the landlord you could have a decent Christmas.
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Firstly sorry to hear about your problems and i hope things get better for you.
We had a mouse problem a couple of years ago they were coming in through a hole in the kitchen wall that led to the outside drain we didn't realise this at the time because the hole was behind fitted kitchen units. Anyway they managed to get everywhere and we must have caught 8 or 9 before we ripped the kitchen out and found the problem.
The fix was to simply fill the hole and we've never had a problem since.
I'm sorry but i simply don't agree that you need to lose all your possessions because of mice, Seriously just wash and clean your stuff we did and have never fell ill once. Have you ever sat down on a lawn or picked a stone up? Well if you have then there's a good chance that you've come in to contact with mouse pee and it didn't kill you did it!
My advice would be to get in touch with Citizens Advice Bureau and Salvage everything you can.
We had a mouse problem a couple of years ago they were coming in through a hole in the kitchen wall that led to the outside drain we didn't realise this at the time because the hole was behind fitted kitchen units. Anyway they managed to get everywhere and we must have caught 8 or 9 before we ripped the kitchen out and found the problem.
The fix was to simply fill the hole and we've never had a problem since.
I'm sorry but i simply don't agree that you need to lose all your possessions because of mice, Seriously just wash and clean your stuff we did and have never fell ill once. Have you ever sat down on a lawn or picked a stone up? Well if you have then there's a good chance that you've come in to contact with mouse pee and it didn't kill you did it!
My advice would be to get in touch with Citizens Advice Bureau and Salvage everything you can.
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I must admit I was partly thinking the same. Seems a bit drastic what you have been asked to do with posessions. Ok so maybe not clothes, but I'm sure the flatscreen telly can go on living it's life if a mouse looked at it funny.
tbh i kind of agree.
Theres no way i would have let it get to a point that the rats were running around my bed whilst i was sleeping in it !
We'd have moved out and put our stuff in storage with pickfords while we found somewhere and stayed with friends / relatives.
That's what I was thinking too. The possessions should have been moved out before the problem became too serious. Admittedly, this is all easier said than done.
With the council/environmental health being involved they will be on your side. It is up to the landlord to sort the issue and if he doesn't do anything about it Environmental Health will carry out the work and charge him for it.
From the pic you posted that's 4 or 5 mice right there. A horrendous position to be in.
From the pic you posted that's 4 or 5 mice right there. A horrendous position to be in.
Cant be that bad for them to get in, their must have been something point they got in that was obvious, do mice go in drains/underground, I know they can get in small spaces but the house must have been built by cowboys for mice to invest time and time again.
Sorry for the delay guys, I nodded off. I'm off to bed for the night in a min, but wanted to address the question above. We didn't move out until now because, literally, in the last six weeks or whatever it's been we went from seeing 'a' mouse and setting traps appropriately, to becoming literally over-run.
You don't leave home because of a single mouse (most wouldn't anyway), but once it's clear you suddenly have dozens, you do.
Rentokill said it's likely a combination of one or two mice quietly moving into the cavities somewhere and giving birth, and the babies then 'spilling out' into the house, and the cold weather meaning several mice have sought refuge here due to the ease of access.
Therefore, we went from 0-eleventy million in a week flat, or so it seemed. If that seems implausible please remember we're talking about a large detached house literally joined on to a large farmer's field. One moment we had a mouse in the house, the next they were waking us up in the night chewing the bed base and running all over the place. :\
It's not as logistically simple as some are making out, nor do we have the cash to 'just' store possessions somewhere else or walk into another property. It's all very well to say if we have children we 'must' have savings, but when you're essentially living hand to mouth on a week-to-week basis it's not so easy. If we had a flat-screen TV to worry about, I'm sure we'd have saved it.
As it is most of the damage has been done via chewing and soiling, and as 99% of our stuff is at 3' or below, they didn't have to too work hard to get at it. The result was rapid carnage. Until you've been cast suddenly into such a situation, I'm not sure it's fair to cast aspersions about how it 'should' have been handled. When you're moderately/severely disabled, struggling with three children and trying to crack on with a degree, your resources are rather stretched and definitely finite.
The report from Rentokill says we did nothing to encourage, and everything to discourage, the infestation, and that it was both rapid and overwhelming. It feels like we went from living happily and comfortably, to being in some kind of bizarre sick movie plot inside a few days, though in reality it's been a bit longer than that.
Immediately as soon as the problem became clear we called out Pest Control, Environmental Health became involved, and we (under their advice as to how bad things actually were) wrote a formal letter to the agency and advised them of our legal position. Once words like 'rent withholding' and 'statutory liability' started being banded about, it's amazing how quickly they decided to call Rentokill and 'get things done'.
As it turns out, it was too little too late. The posts asking about why we didn't get the disrepair sorted sooner are missing the point. Until you actually have cause for alarm (i.e. mice), are you really going to be going mental about getting bristle brushes installed under the door you never use at the other side of the property, or the fact that the pipes enter the house through holes slightly bigger than them? Little things which were previously rather insignificant on their own suddenly take on a large role in exacerbating the problem.
Now that the house is infested, it's been deemed that there is a hell of a lot that needs doing to the house before the mice can be tackled. There's literally not much else we could have done, nor any sooner, short of being prophetic and insisting they fixed it before it happened.
You don't leave home because of a single mouse (most wouldn't anyway), but once it's clear you suddenly have dozens, you do.
Rentokill said it's likely a combination of one or two mice quietly moving into the cavities somewhere and giving birth, and the babies then 'spilling out' into the house, and the cold weather meaning several mice have sought refuge here due to the ease of access. Therefore, we went from 0-eleventy million in a week flat, or so it seemed. If that seems implausible please remember we're talking about a large detached house literally joined on to a large farmer's field. One moment we had a mouse in the house, the next they were waking us up in the night chewing the bed base and running all over the place. :\
It's not as logistically simple as some are making out, nor do we have the cash to 'just' store possessions somewhere else or walk into another property. It's all very well to say if we have children we 'must' have savings, but when you're essentially living hand to mouth on a week-to-week basis it's not so easy. If we had a flat-screen TV to worry about, I'm sure we'd have saved it.
As it is most of the damage has been done via chewing and soiling, and as 99% of our stuff is at 3' or below, they didn't have to too work hard to get at it. The result was rapid carnage. Until you've been cast suddenly into such a situation, I'm not sure it's fair to cast aspersions about how it 'should' have been handled. When you're moderately/severely disabled, struggling with three children and trying to crack on with a degree, your resources are rather stretched and definitely finite.
The report from Rentokill says we did nothing to encourage, and everything to discourage, the infestation, and that it was both rapid and overwhelming. It feels like we went from living happily and comfortably, to being in some kind of bizarre sick movie plot inside a few days, though in reality it's been a bit longer than that.
Immediately as soon as the problem became clear we called out Pest Control, Environmental Health became involved, and we (under their advice as to how bad things actually were) wrote a formal letter to the agency and advised them of our legal position. Once words like 'rent withholding' and 'statutory liability' started being banded about, it's amazing how quickly they decided to call Rentokill and 'get things done'.
As it turns out, it was too little too late. The posts asking about why we didn't get the disrepair sorted sooner are missing the point. Until you actually have cause for alarm (i.e. mice), are you really going to be going mental about getting bristle brushes installed under the door you never use at the other side of the property, or the fact that the pipes enter the house through holes slightly bigger than them? Little things which were previously rather insignificant on their own suddenly take on a large role in exacerbating the problem.
Now that the house is infested, it's been deemed that there is a hell of a lot that needs doing to the house before the mice can be tackled. There's literally not much else we could have done, nor any sooner, short of being prophetic and insisting they fixed it before it happened.
I get the impression that its not the nicest of places regardless, given your comments on the state of the place.
Forget the mice, i would have been out of there a long time before.
Not really mate. There are around 15 air bricks (off the top of my head) around the property, each one uncovered. There are a few gaps in the mortar just above ground level, pipework that has small gaps around it, the garage door doesn't sit flush, and the back door and porch have similar pencil sized gaps. At a glance it's fine, but from a mouse's point of view it's a case of 'doors wide open, access all areas'!
They have very flexible skeletons, so provided their nose will get into a gap, the rest can and does follow. Once they're in, and know how to get in, you've had it. They can scale sheer brick walls (the neighbour has seen this herself up the back of our house) and if there's a way in, they'll find it. Hateful things.
Soldato
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Rainmaker, are you the one that posted a long time ago about the missing heating etc. in different rooms?
Please see my post just after yours. Taken alone, it's not that bad - the access from outside is only really obvious AFTER you've been taken advantage of, and the other things are more 'niggles' until after the fact. The leaning porch, the gaps in the skirting etc were put down to it being an old house rather than dilapidated.
As the head of EH said last week, it's only once you have a problem that these things gain greater significance. The point is if the agency/landlord had taken notice, and action, when we first reported issues in September, things wouldn't have gotten to this level and all the necessary immediate proofing measures and initial control would have been far more successful and we likely wouldn't be on someone's floor flat broke and homeless just before Christmas.
Probably mate, as that's the case in that house, yes. The upstairs bedrooms have no radiators, so the landlord provided two oil-fired plug-in types. He said the house was 'warm anyway' and that he'd fulfilled his obligations by providing the electric plug in ones. To be fair the house is indeed nice and warm once the boiler is going, as the mice have discovered.
We had an entire nightmare LAST year moving house (we ended up moving in the day before Xmas eve), and weren't about to go making ourselves voluntarily homeless over a portable heater and a few gaps in the skirting etc. As I said above, things just sort of came together to make a problem greater than the sum of its parts, and quite quickly.
In your OP you mention long standing disrepair. That it needs gutting and modernising?
Don't understand the mentality of some people in this forum!
How dare you live in a slightly shabby house that wasn't perfect, and how stupid you are for not realising you could spend hour upon hour searching through mouse-excreta looking for things that might possibly not be dangerous once hot-washed/bleached/irradiated/nuked!
Sounds amazing, I almost want to see more pictures of the mess you've been left with - but that's just nosiness... It must absolutely suck - hope the solicitor gets on the case soon!
Have a post-Christmas Christmas - if you can scrape some money together to go out to the shops once the sales have begun, you might still get a happy Christmas and lots of bargains on things that would otherwise have cost you a bomb pre-Christmas.
How dare you live in a slightly shabby house that wasn't perfect, and how stupid you are for not realising you could spend hour upon hour searching through mouse-excreta looking for things that might possibly not be dangerous once hot-washed/bleached/irradiated/nuked!
Sounds amazing, I almost want to see more pictures of the mess you've been left with - but that's just nosiness... It must absolutely suck - hope the solicitor gets on the case soon!
Have a post-Christmas Christmas - if you can scrape some money together to go out to the shops once the sales have begun, you might still get a happy Christmas and lots of bargains on things that would otherwise have cost you a bomb pre-Christmas.
Yes, as I said. I'm not sure how much more clearly I can write it, especially after a week of next to no sleep. The agency have been made aware of 'small' jobs needing doing for months now: The draughty garage door that doesn't fit, the back porch starting to 'lean' and the fact the concrete base is broken, the skirting board gaps where its coming away from the wall, the carpets starting to peel back with age at the edges, the rendering falling off in large chunks...
Individually, small enough jobs. But allowed to pile up, and added to a mouse infestation, it means that the landlord now has to literally go through the place top to bottom, inside and out, to make good the repairs, fix the brickwork, install new frames and doors that actually fit flush (with bristle brush bottoms to boot), re-do the rendering, cover the airbricks, rip out the kitchen units and carpets etc as they've been effectively destroyed by chewing already... So a few long-standing niggles + mice = huge job.
Since there are so many access points, albeit small ones individually, there are more mice moving in than can be killed - so it's a net population growth. So the building work needs doing, THEN the control program starts. If the landlord is fast, they reckon 12 months to finish. If not, much longer. *shrug*
I know it's a bit confusing, but I hope I'm explaining the situation clearly enough to make some sense.
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