Rats moved into our house in July. We bought two traps and caught 4 of them, then we realized that…read morewe needed to hire a professional.
We hired Brandon Swartz, of It's Bugs or Us, at the beginning of August. We paid him a $12,000 deposit for the extermination and future remediation of the damage that had already been done by the rats. He told us that it would take time to truly eliminate all the rats, but he would be actively involved the whole time. The contract we signed stated that he would seal their entry points into our house, set traps in the attic and crawl spaces, leave them be for 12 days, and then check afterwards regularly every 6 days.
He did not seal the house, and each visit was roughly a week to two weeks later than specified in the contract. No rats were caught in any of the traps placed in the attics or crawl spaces. For two months, we lived with rats coming into our house in broad daylight on a daily basis, despite the children loudly playing. Multiple rooms in the house were contaminated with feces and urine, and I could not go into the pantry without hearing the rustling of rats. They ate into much of our stored food, and immediately after I sanitized anything, I was greeted with fresh feces and urine.
Towards the end of the two months, we called Brandon asking for him to please come, as there were literally rats looking at me through entry points in our pantry and kitchen and even standing in the middle of living spaces looking at us. He tacked mesh over the holes in the kitchen and asked me for steel wool to plug up the entry point in the pantry. The rats then busted in through the floor of the pantry. They also began appearing in our bedroom for the first time. We called Brandon again, and he set traps in our pantry. These traps did eventually catch several baby rats, much smaller than the ones we had seen around our house.
At this point, I began calling other exterminators to find out whether it was normal for us to be living in this kind of constant filth and fear after two months of professional help. The general response from the multiple places I called was shock.
The final straw was when I watched a rat make a flying leap across my bedroom into my wardrobe.
We asked Brandon to please sign an updated contract stating that he would refund the $12,000 deposit but that we would pay him $1,500 for the work he had already done. He told us that if we were unhappy, he did not want us to pay him anything, but we insisted on paying for the time and equipment he had already invested, despite our concerns that his inaction may have allowed the rats to multiply in our house as well as allowing two months of extra damage and contamination (not to mention the demoralizing effect on us, never knowing when we would be met by a rat or its excrement).
We hired a different exterminator, who did seal up all the entry points, and showed us pictures of all the various places before and after he closed them up. He also mentioned seeing only a fraction of the number of traps that Brandon claimed that he placed in the attic and crawl spaces, as well as only a fraction of the damage that we were originally going to pay Brandon to remediate. He put in repellant as well. From that day till now, no rats have entered our living spaces. It seemed as if the rat nightmare might finally be over.
However, also from that day, Brandon and his wife have each been contacting us with further requests for money as well as claims that more rats had been trapped that he had not told us about, and also the claim that he did seal up our house on the first visit. We have tried hard to understand where these claims are coming from, but if he had sealed the house as he claimed he did, how were the rats entering on a daily basis for two months, a fact he was aware of?
Our original deposit has still not been refunded, and today, Brandon informed my husband that he plans to sue us.
If you want to get rid of rats, I highly recommend choosing another company.
