My mother-in-law has started getting high number of house flys into her living room over the last week. The largest number was around 15 in one day, but now its down to maybe 2-5 a day which is still upsetting enough. Having ruled out all other possibilities, I was wondering about the fireplace, and finally this morning, I saw a couple actually emerge so I can now be certain.
One was in the top of the fireplace near bits of old newspaper stuffed around a metal sealing plate of some description. The other emerged much further down from a gap between the fire back, and one side of the tiled front of the surround. I've sealed up the fireplace with plastic sheet temporarily, but as I've only lived in a modern house, I'm not sure how best to deal with it.
I assume there is something decomposing up there which the flies are tucking into - but the chimney pot does have like a curved tile over the top of it so I'd have thought until now there was little likelyhood of anything dropping down. I certainly don't want to disturb the sealing plate as the chimney will probably not have been swept in 25-30 years.
I'm thinking that as this is a one-off, I might just call in a chimney sweep but wasn't sure if a sweep typically does things like re-sealing them properly too?
Any thoughts/ideas?
TIA, Midge.