New house has mice!

[apric0t]

We've just completed and picked up the keys to our new house. It's been vacant for a year and we last went there in April, nobody has been inside since. We are not due to move in until next week. Yesterday when we went it to look around, there were rodent droppings in the kitchen and we found a few holes along skirting boards, in corners of cupboards etc.

What's the best plan of action? It's a 3 hour drive away from where we are currently and there's not really time to go down and deal with things before the move date.

Should I fill the holes and bleach everything in sight after we arrive? What to do about the carpets? We were planning on ripping everything up anyway, but hadn't planned on doing it right away because we have a toddler in the house.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

how bigg are the droppings?
mice droppings are tiny.

you need to find out what you are dealing with.

top to bottom clean and a carpet shampoo is probably a good idea

Get a local company in. Give them a key and let them sort it before you move. Tell them your moving in date and that you want all traps/poison/dead things removed by that date. Set in place a contract for £x so they can't just charge willy nilly.

The key thing, and I’m not sure a pest control company does it, is finding out where they are getting in and sorting that out first. Otherwise you can pay pest control to deal with the infestation and then just have it happen again in a few weeks. Ours was an ill fitting original barn door to an outside storage cupboard that had a door on the inside of the house too. So the mice were coming in under the barn door, living it up in the understairs cupboard, then coming in under the door to the house to seek out chocolate and cereal for midnight raves. Ours were field mice though and quite adorable (though I don’t want to house share with them) so after getting the route in fixed we used humane traps and released them a couple of miles away. It was easy to solve tbh.