BED BUGS

it's all rachel carson's fault

I guess, Laurel?

The best thing to do is to sleep somewhere else while isolating everything clean in plastic and waging chemical warfare.

if you can, allow your apartment to get below freezing for one night

I think the deal is that if you've had yr mattress fumigated or steamed, it's helpful to wrap it up in plastic afterward until you're sure the rest of the infestation is gone...otherwise it just gets re-grossed.

Ugh, what a nightmare. I moved into an apartment here in Vancouver with a minor infestation last year, and it was a serious pain in the ass. We ended up having a pest guy come in several times, thankfully paid for by landlord, who treated the place and also gave us this enzyme spray which kills adult bugs-- we basically sprayed down all the furniture and washed the floors, baseboards, etc. regularly with it. This went on for a couple months, but we got rid of them without moving or chucking shit out.

Thank goodness my apt is uncomfortably cold and has giant cement floors separating the storeys. Knocking wood I never get these.

me too... i'm kindo f scared

when i was watching 'i am legend' i couldn't stop thinking of bed bugs. quarantine NYC.

i am really not the person to get something like this. i'm so paranoid i would probably just move.

Even if you moved, you'd still have to go nuts on every piece of clothing or furniture you own, before you could even start dragging them into the hallway.

In their plastic bubbles.

right.

great.

Now I'm kind of nervous b/c I have a couple weird bites on me that itch, and when my neighbors moved in (about a year and a half ago) they told me that they had to leave their last place b/c of bedbugs.

oh. u should have a check up!

i guess using a hair dryer on your bed/furniture can help

oh god that just sounds like a hellish month, hairdrying your whole fucking apartment. i mean, it's just so awful.

the most telling sign of bed bugs is when the bites are several in a row, about an inch or so apart. Apparently they start biting you while you're sleeping, you get restless and move a bit, it knocks them out, they move an inch away and bite again, and this repeats.

it doesn't look at all like flea bites. very distinctive

Hmmm...well then I feel better. I sometimes have allergic reactions similar to the current itchiness, but I've been living in squalor for the past couple months (at least sort of--haven't done laundry in over a month b/c the laundromat is far away and the weather's been shitty) and I got worried.

(My laundry pile is now higher above my dresser top--about 4-1/2 feet. Just been buying new clothes and handwashing some.)

jesse! just drop it off!!

I should. But also I work a lot and (yet, somehow) I've been broke.

My life sucks a little bit right now.

=/ winter doldroms

the bites usually appear in groups of 3. it's not so much that they get knocked off, rather that they're feeding more than once as i understand it.

(bites appeared in groups of 3 for me, anyway.)

oh, and it's possible to have no reaction if you're not allergic to the saliva. i was waking up with itchy spots, and my bf wasn't. as far as he knew, nothing was wrong. we thought i had an allergic reaction to something until our neighbors mentioned it to us.

yes

this is what is happening to my friend -- her hsuband has no reaction

I've actually been told that men are far less likely to have a reaction to the bites than women are.

Sorry about that, ladies.

i guess, living as i am with my gay male lover, maybe we won't react

That would be pretty awkward if he were straight

you're right it would.

ha!

okay but what about clothes like stored away -- is it necessary to wrap/wash those too?

how are they stored? how close to the bed?

i think they're like in a dresser in the same small bedroom, in drawers

bedbugs love that shit, they're all over it. Empty out drawers. Deal with clothes, clean dresser.

so the friend i started this thread about, she moved recently. and in nyc they offer bedbug moving services, where they take all your stuff, put it in some space overnight and fumigate it. they also treat the new space. and she STILL FOUND ONE at her new apt.

but wanna hear the kicker? she's not sure whether or not she just saw one on her DESK AT WORK. WHICH IS IN THE SAME ROOM AS MINE. i'm on the fence as to whether or not i should be petrified. i don't have thousands of dollars with which to deal with this problem right now in my life.

yup, still kind of freaking out. she keeps telling me she's getting bites, this and that, baby bugs BLA. she's like my best friend and i've been supporting her throughout the process but at some point, if this happens to me, it's going to be hard not to feel bitter and i hate that.

Whoa, bedbugs are real? I thought it was just a cute thing moms said. I know absolutely nothing.

lol "sleep tight"

last night at 3:30 in the morning, my roommate and i found a couch curbside and needing a couch decided to take it. it sat in our apartment for about 10 hours before we figured out that it had bed bugs. we have hardwood floors, it wasnt touching any furniture and we dont appear to have any bites, but how worried should we be about them spreading and what measures should we take?

and yea, we're pretty stupid

If it was me, I'd assume they were everywhere already and I'd get a giant sack of DE and a steamer and never sleep again.

(ymmv)

Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

maybe ill just fill the apartment with water for a few days and hope they drown

i got these in my apartment a few years ago when my downstairs neighbor brought in a used couch that was infested. getting rid of them required two visits from the exterminator, and putting everything i owned into giant ziploc/vacuum-sealable bags for three weeks. i threw out my mattress too, but i still got bites sleeping on the carpet.

it wasn't that bad because i spotted them pretty quickly and took action. i knew they were bedbugs because i knew what to look for. so with me it was a matter of killing the existing ones and making sure they didn't breed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K22mwRcx1gQ

bed bug

how fast moving bed bug

fuck that video

Just ordered a new bed (overdue for one anyway, but y'know, no money forever).

Might buy some of that Diatomaceous earth ment'd above to put under the bed and mattress at the hardware store.

Besides washing or burning all my clothes and towels, what else? Near zero-budget level.

btw they might be fleas, i don't know, but the doorman told me last year that someone in the building had bedbugs.

Once you have gone to INSANE-seeming lengths to get rid of them (and you should),

yeah, i just can't expend that kind of energy on anything.

also i haven't actually seen one yet, but the 3 bites i got look like the internet pics.

if you haven't already done it:

1) buy a plastic cover for your current bed, if you still have it.
2) when the new bed arrives, keep it wrapped up in plastic and away from everything else. don't want to risk ruining your nice new bed while this is going on.

the best tip that i didn't know about at the time is:

3) this'll look a little insane, but push your current bed away from the walls a few feet, then put soapy tupperware containers underneath each of the four legs. these are death moats to protect your bed. Advanced guide here: http://cchealth.org/bedbugs/pdf/How-to-Make-Your-Bed-a-Safe-Haven-from-Bed-Bugs.pdf

hmmmm... thanks.

biggest problem is i don't have a few feet. and my bed doesn't really have legs. (The frame basically broke apart years ago.)

i think getting rid of a few of the mounds of magazines and newspapers would probably help too.

hmm, not having legs on the bed is a bummer, my wife and i used these little cup things on the legs of our bed with diatomaceous earth in them when we lived in a place with bed bugs and it worked really well - never got bitten. i suppose just putting diatomaceous earth all round the bed in a little mound could help.

we threw away our box spring, dried everything fabric that would fit in a tumble dryer for like a couple of hours, and put a cover on the mattress, threw away some books that were near the bed (found a bed bug inside a copy of borges' labyrinths) . a couple of months later we were lucky enough to be able to move - our landlady's daughter had had bedbugs and left a bunch of her washing in the basement, with bedbugs in it, basically infesting the house. landlady didn't care about this or even think it was the root, was the final straw. our new place just had black mould instead of bedbugs.

thx jim & Karl

i see online that my bldg management will send an exterminator, so i guess i'm calling.

btw KM that pdf you linked recommends a fabric cover as being safer than a plastic one.

also a new frame is coming with the new bed, so i guess i could put the d-earth under the legs then.

so it's safe to unpack the new bed about a month from now?

fuckin' nightmare

Been through it -- nightmare it is.

More effective than an exterminator is if they can heat your apartment to something like 120 for 8 hours. Heat kills better than anything they can spray.

i used a fabric cover, it worked - still have the same mattress now and have been bedbug free for 3 years

commisserations dr morb

my apt goes up to 120 in August, but i hope i'll have moved by then

Ugh, bed bugs are vile and hideous. I had them for a while, though it took me long enough to find what they were and what was happening. Someone in my building had told me a while before that her neighbour had had them, I didn't think anymore about it but the little bastards are nothing if not expansionist. Anyway, ditched my bed, bed clothes etc, found them in a pile of magazines near my bed, and in the spine of a book and several other places. I got rid of them by going on a mad killing spree, armed with WD40, which kills them (and most insects) instantly. Touch wood, they've never come back (holes and knotholes in wood being somewhere they like to congregate).

... this was several years ago, so pretty certain I'm safe now.

i'm a pedestrian. does WD40 leave stains?

Probably, I'm not recommending it as anything other than a way to instantly get rid of the bastards. Professional help would be preferable.

so i take it the boxspring/mattress covers are in the bedding store

Bedding, Bathing & Beyond has them.

Bed, Bath & BED BUGS

tore the bed apart, found nobody.

spread the d-earth around.

so my landlord's exterminator refused to spray for them bcz i had no "evidence"

ie i didn't save the one i pulled off my butt at the beginning

now i have psychosomatic itching and am determined to move

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/bed-bug-madness-the-psychological-toll-of-the-blood-suckers/381447/

the new bed i bought in April is still in the box, of course.

who has a freezer big enough to put all their books?

fuck this, had a scare which, yeah, posted about up thread about a thousand years ago.

now it's the real deal, not def infesting, maybe coming from neighbors apt. dealing w/ our own pest control company we called and managements, someone's coming friday. start some treatments as well as super going to use silicone to plug up gaps around floorboard.

in the meantime box spring and mattress and pillows are covered. bed pulled away from wall. Was recommended to temporarly put masking tape covered w/ vaseline around the bed so doing that now.

bugs have no effect on me. wife is covered in huge itchy bites. we'll start drying and bagging clothes shortly but don't know what to do with all the books in the bedroom. And my entire home studio. mangement's people do the spray, they say is fine for electronics. that makes me really really nervous.

fuck this. was about to make a snarky comment about bringing back DDT but went and read about that and decided that's a stupid thing to say.

I used diatomaceous earth round the bed frame (You get special plastic cups that you put the legs in and the diatomaceous earth sits in a little moat around them). Put any fabric that can withstand being put in the dryer on high in the dryer for 90 minutes or so. Vacuum like crazy, dumping the bags immediately if you have that type of vacuum. If you have the time look through your books, I literally found a bug sitting in a book. And threw the book out. Can't think of anything else other than the spraying.

in the most horrific apartment i ever lived in, i think only reason the bedbugs went away was because ants came in and killed them

where can i get these ants you speak of?

this is a nightmare of mine. best of luck

That sucks. Does Marie Kondo have a chapter about this?