I was duped into buying a rat-infested home — and only found out because I was pregnant

When Sarah Hurst and her husband started trying to conceive their third child in 2021, they knew it was time to start searching for a new house.

And so, when the opportunity arose for them to purchase a property in Ilkley, West Yorkshire for considerably lower than the market price, they jumped at it.

They were pleased with the condition of the home, and had informed the owners that they couldn’t afford to immediately spend a huge amount of money on renovations, hoping that this would ward off any glaring issues.

The house needed work eventually, but it could wait for now – and they were happy with that deal.

However, prior to buying the home, they’d had a routine survey carried out and found what they thought were rodent droppings in the loft.

Querying it with the owners, they said that they’d had a squirrel up there a few years ago which had since been dealt with. Trusting their answer – as the lady Sarah was buying from was her doctor at the time – they pushed on with the decision.

But when Sarah and her family moved in, she was already six weeks pregnant. She was sure that she could detect the musty scent that comes with a rat infestation, but her husband wasn’t convinced.

As Sarah was convinced the musky ‘cabbage’ smell was worsening, the couple decided to call in pest control – and they confirmed her worst fears.

‘Within five minutes of him arriving at our house and having a quick look around, he confirmed that not only did we have a historic rat infestation, but there was also a current rat infestation of live and decaying rats,’ Sarah, who runs a blog called ArthurWears, explained in a TikTok video which was subsequently liked over 20,000 times.

But because he couldn’t find any entrance holes into the property, he advised that they needed a drainage report to see if it was the drains that were acting as a front door for the rats.

And, low and behold, as he was setting it up, a rat walked in front of the camera and into the kitchen through a hole in the pipes.

‘We paid to have the hole sealed up and more bait laid down, and we hoped that that would solve the problem,’ Sarah recalled.

‘We had to have a full rewire of the house because the wiring had been chewed extensively by the rats and it was dangerous.

‘We also had to have the whole house replumbed, and during these works, we found out that in the downstairs bathroom, the waste pipe had been chewed so badly that the waste was actually going under the floor and the subfloor of the house…the exact same thing happened in the upstairs bathroom.’

Then, after a few days of working on the house, the electricians downed their tools and left, stating that they ‘weren’t going to continue working on the house until the smell had subsided,’ as in bringing up the floorboards, they’d discovered huge amounts of rat corpses that were now quickly decaying.

In fact, one was so large that they mistook it for a cat, as brown rats can grow to be between 15 and 27cm long, with tails reaching up to 24cm.   

At that point, Sarah and her husband decided that they needed to contact the previous owners who, despite the fact that there had been bait laid recently and new corpses found beneath the floorboards, maintained that they had no idea there was a rat problem.

Ringing around the local pest control companies to see if he could find out whether anyone had worked on the property before they moved in, Sarah’s husband was able to find more information about the infestation.

They’d visited eight times in the last few months, with the last visit being the day before the new family moved in.

‘Normally, you don’t have to disclose a rat infestation, but the fact that we asked means that they should have told us,’ Sarah noted.

‘We did an out-of-court settlement for a small amount of money. It wasn’t even enough to cover the decontamination and insulation of the loft.

‘By this point, we’d had to pay for two new bathrooms, a full rewire, replumbing, all of the visits, the drain survey, the drain repairs and the loft decontamination. I was pregnant and I just couldn’t fight anymore, as we needed that money to help pay for things.’

Naturally, Sarah’s followers were appalled at the ordeal she and her family went through – and some even recalled similar experiences.

‘We moved into our property four months ago. We just recently looked in the loft as we were told we weren’t allowed to use it, and have discovered heavy rat droppings,’ @glastogoddess wrote.

It was a similar situation for @clairywairyfairy, who had her new house rewired after she moved in. As he went up into the loft, the electrician found a note which read: ‘beware, rat house.’

‘I also bought a rat-infested house with a large wasp nest, [there was] nothing in the survey. I had to remove everything in the attic and re-insulate, rewire, and have the drains fixed,’ @gilljones0 added.

‘Only when I got a cat did they leave.’