We’ve lived in our townhouse for a little over 5 years now. It’s 3 stories, basement with utility room, main floor with kitchen and living room, upstairs with laundry and bedrooms. It’s an end unit of 4-5 attached houses and ours is right next to a little forested area and a decently large field.
When we first moved in there were mice in our basement utility room but we never saw any besides there and we thought the traps caught them all. We’ve been paying for pest control separate from our rent since we moved in because our landlord only wanted to deal with things on a case by case basis and not any regular prevention.
This last December we started hearing scurrying on the main floor and eventually discovered a whole mice infestation throughout all 3 floors of our house and caused A LOT of damage from droppings.
I will fully admit that we are clutter people, we live with health conditions and it gets out of hand. Not hoarder level clutter by any means but there’s definitely stuff on the ground and on tables. (Also context with health issues I’m immune compromised and so is my dog, our landlord knew our family had health issues before we signed the first lease)
The mice infestation this winter was so bad that we spent all our time locked in the upstairs bedrooms that seemed to be spared and had to bleach the kitchen anytime we needed to cook. We had to hire a biohazard team to clean up all the droppings.
When the infestation was going on we tried to talk to our landlord about it but he fully blamed us for the infestation and even threatened it as a violation of our lease, saying it was because of our clutter. For the record there is literally nothing in our lease about whose responsibility any type of pest control is. Our landlord is usually great but since this he’s been kind of snippy about things. So we dealt with the infestation and costs for pest control and biohazard cleaning ourselves.
(Context on landlord, its just a single guy not a landlord company)
We’ve had pest control even verify that there were holes in the house that the mice definitely got in from (we’ve had other kind of infestations like yellowjackets, and yearly lady beetles and stink bugs). There’s holes in our windows so big that on a very windy day you can see curtains move and it whistles all day. We had traps everywhere, different kinds of traps, throughout the house. There was an absolute mess of dropping on top of several of them.
By February we thought all the mice had been dealt with (yes it took over a month) and we slowly started trusting our home again. But this week I started hearing scurrying again, found a few droppings, and just saw a mouse in person during the day. We’re currently freaking out with it in our kitchen. I’m assuming quite a few have still been living in our walls.
If this blows up into a full infestation again it’s going to be really hard financially again.
And if this keeps happening every year it’s a huge problem.
Whose responsibility is it if there’s nothing in the lease?
For laws we live in Montgomery County, Maryland.
I've sent our lease to a friend in the past to verify I didn't miss anything about pest control and they noted that the lease looks kind of homemade, like its not a fully comprehensive document and there are several mistakes.
Edited to add because I forgot: Our's isn't the only house in the neighborhood that has had mice. We don't have a clue how bad infestations in other houses are but we know that other houses regularly deal with mice too.