I am sick of slugs INSIDE my house!

[MrsSeanBean]

We have a 1920s brick house.

Slugs somehow get inside the house - mainly at night - and I come down to their horrible slimy trails all over the floor every morning.

I called the pest control people at the council who advised me to lay cracked eggshells outside the air-bricks, but still the problem persists. Aside from laying pellets inside the house (dodgy), I don't know what else to do. Sometimes I come down in the night to get a glass of water and find the slugs crawling around. My patience and sanity is wearing very thin.

(a) Does anyone else have this hideous problem;
(b) if so, how did you solve it?

couple weeks on and no further sightings although I'm paranoid and constantly wash floor and replace pellets,
had a word with builder and he was gutted, swears every hole filled up, told me not to leave washing machine door open overnight (er...eew...surely not climbing up through there???),
have pelleted all along dining room french windows where the exposed brick shelf at bottom meets floor (yep found trail there few weeks ago - perhaps they've rerouted from kitchen) and so far nothing -

actually found one coming up through shower plughole (bathroom downstairs) a couple years ago but once salted no more occurrence there - yuck!

I have just found this site and I'm so glad I'm not on my own, I Like the idea of the human slug repellent, can I hire him please? I moved into this bungalow 18 months ago and I'm overrun with them. Kitchen, living room, bathroom and bedroom the only place I haven't found them is in the hall. My poor dog doesn't trust her food bowl any more because I found a family of them eating her food. I've tried salt but sometimes all I find is the slime trail and can anybody tell me how the little sods manage to surface in the middle of a carpet?

I also have slug trails, random patches on rugs every other day but now iv found where they might be coming in - there's a lot of trails by the window and I have gappy wooden floors, holes for radiator pipes and an old terraced house. If it was slug bingo I'd win!

But now I've found their corner I have total heebie-jeebies about exploring further in case I actually see one. I'm hiding upstairs with the iPad until DP comes home! They make me feel slovenly and unclean

We have a 1920s house and have a problem with slugs in the kitchen. They seem to live under the washing machine and come out in the dark.

I have decided just to coexist with them, after trying to control them for 15 years.

I have learnt not to get a glass of water in the middle of the night without turning the lights on.

I too have slug in house problems. My house is 1930's. I wonder if problems are due to having central heating fitted in older houses ie gaps in floor boards where radiators and water pipes (behind washing machine, sink etc) come up into rooms, also cold water pipes under floorboards could maybe cause condensation.
The main reason I've posted on here is that I believe slug pellets have an attractant in them to bait the poison (metaldehyde)..... I think it used to be called Slug Bait....so putting under floor boards may kill while active but not continue to kill hatching eggs AND may actually attract slugs in.
Sorry if that puts the cat amongst the pigeons!
Any poisoned slugs that manage to get into house from under floorboards ofcourse are a danger to youngsters & pets!

maybe try following the shiny slime trails on your hands and knees... You'll probably catch up with them quite quickly. No seriously, I have a horrible feeling they can actually seep through brickwork. They must be grazing on the paper in the box files of important documents I keep on the floor... Damp is their friend. Terrible year for slugs, I have a security flood light by the back door. Every night I go out and squash 20 or so snails/slugs. Like p-ing in the wind I fear. But at least I'm doing my bit in the great war. Don't give up.
Useful tips on suppressing them naturally in the garden include digging before frost - it kills the eggs - little white spheres

I used about half a tub of salt trying to get them out of the house. I live in a communal building and they live in the services panel so I started salting where I thought they were coming through which made a massive difference, I then found other areas and just kept salting. They can get through a gap a couple of mm wide. I know this because I've found the remains of some suicidal slugs!

Look for any opening to the outside world and salt it. Rub it into the cracks. If there are high level openings fill the gap with salt or if too big with salted kitchen roll. Slugs are clever and won't go near salt but they can step over it so if you can't fill a gap, make sure you do it a couple of cm wide.

how much salt would you need? just a light dusting or a solid salt dyke?

victorian house here.
but weirdly the slugs only leave trails on the wooden chopping boards, not on the floor or walls

As long as there's no where for them to step it should be OK. I filled the gaps (they're coming under the kickboards in the kitchen where it's not meeting the floor) completely with salt and my tumble dryer cupboard I put a carpet of it down (totally paranoid at that point!) A few other places I've put some down as just a dusting.

We had them in a flat I lived in when I was a student, still gives me the willies thinking about it, I remember once ironing and thinking some manky bugger had spilled chips and left them on the floor when the whole jing bang got up and slimmed off :(
In our war of attrition against them we lost the kitchen to them and built a mini Maginot Line across the hall door way, consisting of a lot of salt in the corners of the door frame and a big harry rug full of builders sand and salt, which did actually work but looked terrible.
I've seen them once in this house years ago but we put out a whole load of beer traps in the garden every autumn and I've never seen them again. The traps seem to have the double effect of attracting them away from the house and killing them off by the hundred.

Slugs in the house are because the house is damp. The Slugs are not the problem they are showing that there is a damp problem. If the damp problem is not sorted the floorboards and floor supports will rot. If you dig down about a foot down outside the house by the problem wall and remove the earth and replace it with shingle, the damp will disappear

If only getting rid of damp were always that simple

Would be nice, Turnip!

Can't stop reading this. Just want to say, yes slugs are gross but they beat the out of cockroaches. Love the bat in bathrobe story! Now feel empowered to consider all approaches, thanks Mumsnetters!

I had them in a ground floor Victorian flat and got rid by liberally pouring salt around the perimeter of the flat.

So glad to find this topic! We've had slug problems on and off since we moved into our flat 18 months ago :( Thought we'd finally gotten rid of them until poor ds was in our bedroom with me this morning and suddenly sat on the bed with his foot in the air - he'd only got one of the little buggers stuck to his foot! Went to explore round the bedroom and found a teeny tiny one boldly making its way across the bedroom floor :-O have stuck a glass over it and a ring of salt around the glass and shut the door and now waiting til oh gets home from work :-/ does anyone know if a little tiny one means eggs have hatched in the house somewhere?

the last few weeks we didn't have many. have started to put a cup of salt into the water I wash the floors with.

Old victorian house here and I'm sure the slugs have a party in the middle of the night, or slug olympics or something always trails on my rug tried a few things but they always come back.

The other night I came downstairs as I couldn't sleep fired up my laptop and put my hand on my mouse, it was then I glanced down and realized I had a slug on my mouse with my hand resting on it, every few days or so all I could say was ewwww and shudder yuck horrible slimy things they are.

Oh that's awful about the mouse! I am very vigilant in the night, and avoid downstairs. However ours have disappeared for a few weeks!

I've not read through the whole thing but ours used to come in through a fireplace. I put slug pellets down (inside the grate so no little fingers could get them) and that stopped the problem.

I have absoloutly had it with the slimy dirty horrible shitty slugs in my house :( as soon as i get ip in a morning the first thing i have todo is vac the trails up off my living room carpet just so that my baby can sit on the carpet. We do have a major damp problem that im waiting on my landlord to sort out. The damp has got so bad in my room that behond my wallpaper part of my wall is now just a hole where the the sly gits are sliding in, now i can deal with the slug trails, but what happend this evening has finally made me crack and thinking about squirting expanding foam into the hole of my wall where they are getting in because earlier i noticed a slug only a small one so i got the dustpan to pick it up and throw out the door but when i got closer i saw all these tiny white things crawling all over it!!!! I have never cringed as much in my whole life i got on my hands and knees and hooverd the carpet for over half an hour. Its made me want to bleach the whole house top to bottom!!! I swear to god its made me feel so sick. I have 4 children , the youngest only just gone 1, it worrys me to think how horrible and dirty they are basically burgeling my room every night with there dirt and slime while me and my children sleep!!!! I just cant stand the thought of it.........sick to death of the cheeky little ba***s!!! :(((((

The hairs on my arms and neck are just on end because i cant stop cringing about it!!!what the hell were they?!?!?!

I read that your typical hedgehog would have to eat an enormous amount of slug pellets before it would do them any damage at all. Don't know if it's true though.

I live in a '20s semi. We get them - tiny little baby ones, sometimes in the sitting room, sometimes in the dining room or kitchen. I go through a few days of scooping them up and getting rid of them, and then there are no more for a while, then they start again. There have been less since it started getting colder.

They also seem to have trails that appear from nowhere.

It gets me when i take one right to the bottom of the drive and then an identical one reappears!?! Are they really that clever to find there way back?? Either way they are not clever enough to realise il only set themfree once and they wont b so lucky the next time. Im actually going too google how clever those slimy little unwanted tennants are!! :)