Mice Behind Kitchen Units - What Should You Do?

Why It Is Always the Kitchen

A fitted kitchen creates a continuous, warm, dark corridor running the length of a wall, behind the units and under them, with food above it and water pipes running through it. It is close to the best mouse habitat that can be built into a house by accident.

It also connects. The kickboard void usually runs behind the appliances, past the pipe penetrations under the sink, and often straight into a cavity or under a floor. So a mouse behind the units is not confined to the kitchen — it is on a road.

What to Do First

Take the kickboards off. They are usually clipped on and come away by hand, and everything you need to know is behind them: droppings, gnawed packaging, nesting material, and the gaps around the pipes where they are getting in and out.

Then look under the sink at every pipe and cable that passes through the carcass or the wall, and behind the fridge and the washing machine. Ten minutes of that will tell you more than a week of listening.

What Not to Do

Do not start putting shop-bought bait into the void. It competes with a professional treatment, it makes the follow-up impossible to read, and bait taken into a wall void by a mouse that then dies there is exactly how you end up with a smell you cannot locate.

Do not fill gaps with expanding foam either. Mice chew straight through it, and it makes the gaps harder to find and properly seal later.

Clean, But Clean the Right Things

The crumbs on the worktop are not what is keeping them. What matters is under and behind: the spillage under the units, the residue behind the cooker, the pet food bowl left down overnight, and the packet of something in the bottom cupboard that has already been gnawed into.

Move dry goods into hard containers rather than bags. Mice open bags, boxes and packets without difficulty and a chewed packet in a low cupboard is often the first thing anyone actually notices.

What a Treatment Does Differently

It goes into the void along the runs, in the places you have just uncovered, rather than into the room. It uses the evidence to work out how far the route extends, which frequently means looking at the room next door and at the floor below.

And it separates two questions that people tend to merge: getting rid of the mice that are there, and closing the gaps so it does not happen again. The first is the £190 treatment with the follow-up included. The second is rodent proofing at £180 for up to an hour, and it is your call whether you want it.