Winter Pest Proofing: The One-Hour Walk Round Your Home

The clocks have gone back, your evenings are dark, and everything that's been living quite happily in your garden and the fields beyond has started looking for somewhere warmer. Your house is the somewhere. You have a short window now, before the cold properly arrives, in which an hour spent checking common entry points can reduce many of the problems that otherwise appear in winter. Here's exactly where to spend it.

Take a torch, even in daylight

Start outside, work anticlockwise round your house, and look low. Most of what matters is below knee height, which is why standing back and admiring the place tells you nothing useful.

Doors. Kneel at each of your external doors and look for daylight under it. A gap you can see light through is a gap a mouse can use. Brush strips are cheap and take minutes to fit.

Where pipes and cables enter. Waste pipes, gas and water services, the hole drilled for a cable years ago and never made good. These are your classic entry points, because whoever drilled the hole made it slightly bigger than the thing going through it. Use a suitable gnaw-resistant proofing product, such as corrosion-resistant mesh combined with an appropriate sealant. Around cables, service penetrations or fire-resisting construction, use materials suitable for that location and do not obstruct ventilation or safe access.

Airbricks and vents. Check every one you have for broken vanes or missing mesh. They need to keep venting, so cover with mesh rather than blocking them.

Your roofline. Look up now: lifted or slipped tiles, gaps at the fascia and soffit, and overhanging branches giving squirrels a route onto your roof. Before sealing roof gaps or arranging treatment, check for bats and nesting birds. Bat roosts are legally protected even when bats are not visibly present, so seek advice if there are signs of a roost.

Along the walls. Log piles, stacked timber, dense ivy, bins pushed against the house, an old shed on bearers. All of it gives cover right up to your walls, and rodents strongly prefer covered routes.

Then ten minutes inside

Under your kitchen sink, where the pipework goes through. Behind the plinth under your fitted units if you can get it off. Your airing cupboard, and anywhere pipes pass between floors. Your loft hatch, which should seal properly. And the garage, particularly where it meets the house.

Two habits worth more than the sealant

Get your dry food into hard containers rather than packets. It removes an important food source and supports control, although an established mouse problem will usually also require exclusion, monitoring and possibly trapping or professional treatment.

Keep your bins closed and away from the wall, and manage the feed you put out for birds or hens rather than scattering it. Food brings them in; cover keeps them. Take away both and you've done most of the work.

What this hour won't do

Honesty matters here. Proofing prevents; it doesn't evict. If something is already inside, careless sealing can trap it in an inaccessible void or move activity elsewhere. Control and proofing are often coordinated: identify active routes, avoid sealing animals into the structure and close entry points at the appropriate stage of the treatment plan.

It also won't stop everything. A determined rat will gnaw a new entry, and older buildings in rural Wales have more gaps than any afternoon can close. What it does is remove the easy invitations, which is most of them.

Our pages on rats, mice and squirrels cover the signs of each, and our pest control page explains how we work across South and Mid Wales.

Get in touch

Found something on your walk round that needs more than sealant? Get in touch and we'll take a look before winter.