feeling really miserable...

[Ellaroo]

Precursor to this message: I am fastidiously clean and tidy and the vermin I am about to discuss are no reflection on my housekeeping!!! (I hope!)

I'd recently posted a thing about slugs in my kitchen, and although it sounds comical it was actually getting me down quite a lot (i found one slithering over the oven the other night!), but now things have just got worse. I called the council pest control the other day as when I was doing some gardening a large 'mouse' ran over my foot, but when the pest controller came today he had a good look around and said that we actually have rats and that they have burrowed a tunnel under the old foundations of the house! I feel utterly depressed and like there are creatures everywhere trying to make my life a misery. (this is the thanks I get for being a vegetarian for 20 years!!! - only joking, but it does seem slightly ironic!) Our garden is miniscule and I don't feel like I can take dd out there to play now without being inches away from a rat. I am absoloutely terrified of most creatures and the idea of my house being infested with them is making me feel utterly miserable. Sorry, I know from reading other posts that this is really a relatively minor problem compared to what some people are coping with, but I just needed a good rant!

[Bozza]

Ellaroo - big sympathies about the rats - I mean mice are one thing, but rats... I'm sure that it has nothing at all to do with your cleanliness or otherwise. What are the pest control going to do about it? Sorry not much I can do except sympathise. It seems such a shame that you can't enjoy the summer with your DD.

[Ellaroo]

Pest control have put some bait down the hole and are coming back next week to see if they have had any luck. However, I am such a wimp about these things that I think even if they do manage to get rid of them I won't be able to relax in the garden for a very long time (I haven't sat and relaxed in the conservatory for nearly a year after seeing two extremely large spiders in there - I still check the walls and floor every time I walk through it!) If the creatures carry on their invasion at this rate I will have about one cubic metre in my house where I feel safe - probably standing on a chair!

[FrancesJ]

I'm sure that pest control will able to sort out the problem properly - and totally sure it's nothing to do with you - I used to work in a shop that had loads of rats - no food on the premises, all very clean, they just used to live there - until they were rentokilled. Eurgh, for you, though. I'd wait untill the problem had been fixed by pest control, then have a massive re-paint and tidy - move all the furniture around so as to make myself feel better - psycologically and all that. And plant lots of things in tubs/windowboxes so that you can have a garden inside the house.

[ionesmum]

We had rats at our last house, and despite being veggie I had no qualms about killing them because of the diseases they spread and the harm they do to other animals, dd not being born then. IMO the best way of getting rid of them is a dog, but ratters are hard to come by these days. Our cat was good with mice but found the rats too numerous. We paid for a firm to deal with our rats, they came every week to take away the corpses and renew the bait and it was worth every penny.

[monkey]

Warning - long long long!
Oh Ellaroo, I feel so sorry - your post brings back a lot of bad memories! We lived in an old house in London, and shortly after moving in we discovered there were rats living under it. It was a miserable time.

There was a problem (can't get technical or specific) with the drains sewers coming from the road to our house. The council pest control responded reasonably promptly ( ie in a couple of days), and put down bait. I think he came back a couple of times, to see if it had been eaten, and replenish stocks, but, they would not remove the dead rats as they were under floor boards).

I was freaking out. I too was a veggie (do they KNOW, or something!) and found the whole situation totally traumatic. I was also really ashamed, so couldn't talk to mum or anyone about it.

Anyway, when they died under the floor boards, the stench was incredible. Dh couldn't smell it at first and thought I was imagining it! Then we were infested by blue bottles. He believed me then. We had several episodes of having to pull up the floor boards in the front room, hunting for corpses. We even had to cancel Christmas (bot sets of parents due to come for the day!) at the last minute - another stinking corpse, and lie to them, pretending we were so disorganised we hadn't done the shopping! Luckily we're so scatty it was reasonably believable.

Anyway, after my tales of woe, some advice :-

You need to find out where they're coming from, eg communal drains like our were. Frankly - don't want to depress you, because hopefully you won't be in the same situation, that problem was not going to be solved with a bit of bait. The whole street was riddled with them. There were gaps in the foundations between the houses, so as well as coming from the drains into our houde, they could run probably the whole length of the street under the floors. there was no way to stop them coming under our house. All we could do was try and stop them coming INTO the house.

To stop them coming into your house you need to go round and block off, with expanding foam filler or anything you can! Get pest control to advise you - any holes or gaps you can find. Look behind units, in the back of cupboards, every inch of your skirting boards for any gaps at all.

Don't leave any food out. This is a drag, but you need to put everything in the fridge or in tupperware. Apparently they especially love dried foods. Another tale of woe. I left a cheese sandwhich in the spare bedroom while I went to our room for something. Came back and found a rat in there! I had a bizarre idea that the problem was restricted to the ground floor, so was totally freaked out to find one in the bedroom. I was also freaking out about our baby! The council couldn't respond just like that. I was too chicken to tackle it, so had to pay about £50 for a private firm to come at once and shoot it! In the hour or so it took for them to come, it has ruined the carpet by scratching and knawing at it to get out. Totally hideous.

We decided in the end, that the problem with dying rats and stinking corpses and lifting the floor boards was worse than them being under the house, so in the end we stopped using bait and concentrated on keeping them out.

I think in our situation the problem would never be solved until the council totally re-did the drains/sewers. Dh's grandad, an expert on all things said that technically the whole street was "unfit for human habitation" because of the victorian drainage system, which aparently would not pass any modern standards.

I was so glad we were moved by dh's firm, and got to leave the house.

Sorry - this may have made you feel 100% worse. i guess moving isn't a logical option! Hope at least a couple of points prove useful. The very best of luck.

[Ellaroo]

Oh Monkey, that is truly horrific (I am typing this with my feet up on the chair, as it has made me feel very squeamish just reading it). We can actually see the hole that the rats have dug to get under the house, so thankfully I do not think it is a drain problem. However, at present there are no skirting boards in the utility room after it flooded (washing machine!) and they disintegrated! - so am now going to make dh do something about them! Oooh, am now wishing I'd never read your post, that is really horrible. In the supermarket yesterday they asked Chris Rat to go to customer services desk over the tannoy and I felt like it was a conspiracy to remind me of them everywhere I went. Urg.

[Azzie]

Monkey, I sympathise. My dh had this happen in his college flat when I first met him. The college had a rat problem (if you sat and looked out of the window for 5 mins or so you'd often see one amble across the lawn). When the pest control people laid the poison one crawled under the bathroom floor and died. The college refused to lift the floor or offer my dh alternative accommodation, so he and his flatmates went unwashed for a week or so and used the toilets in the college bar. Then a week or so after the smell disappeared the huge bluebottles appeared. Yuk.

[ionesmum]

Ooooooooh yuk is the word! At least ours were only in the shed.

Why do rats seem to deliberately target veggies? Do they think that we'll keep them as pets or something?

[Ellaroo]

This is my worry, ionesmum, I would happily stage a barbeque with a pig on a spit for extra authenticity...if I wasn't so scared to go out there! Don't worry ks, a bond-style cat sounds quite fun though. Have just been looking at houses on the internet - have told dh that I want to move to an above first-floor newly built apartment block as I can no longer do this whole period-living thing. The house is making me absolutely miserable and all the things that appealed to me about it when we bought it, now drive me mad. Dh says this is fine, but then we wouldn't have a garden for dd, but at the moment I feel like I'll never go in the garden again anyway. Can't stop imagining them scurrying round under my kitchen floorboards - am keeping my shoes firmly on! Thanks for your support.

[monkey]

Oh Ellaroo, sorry to depress you!

I felt like that about our house. So so so glad to move. DH hated modern houses with no character. Frankly, he was paying, so I thought he could have what he wanted, as long as I didn't hate it. Blimey, after the rats, the bluebottles, the damp and the hastle trying to sell the bloody thing (very expensive & desirable Battersea btw!) I never want to live in an old house or a 'trendy' neighbourhood again thank you very much!

Just settle for a newly built house with big garden and no track record of rats! I don't think dh appreciated how bad it was because he wasn't in all day, he often went away on business, and he's clearly got no sence of smell. By the end, every time he passed wind (quite frequently!) I thought another rat had dies, everytime I heard a noise during the day I was paranoid it was a rat scrabbling about trying to get at my baby. I had this fear every day. He just had to pull up the floor boards a few times (on my insistance!). really horrible.

All the best.