Getting Rid Of Bed Bugs: a house log

I owe you fair warning that this post might give you the willies. It is a horror story from my renter days that I hoped to share in hopes that it may assist someone experiencing something similar.

When I made my post-graduation move to New York City in June 2004, I rented a two-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens with a college roommate. It was less than pleasant, but my roomie and I were simply glad to find a place with big bedrooms with low-cost rent. All in all, it seemed like the ideal place to cram with my seen-better-days IKEA furniture, “decorate” with low-cost posters and kick off life as an adult. Little did I know I’d in fact end up living like this:

But let us start at the beginning. I randomly woke up in the middle of one August night and headed to the kitchen for some water. I turned on the light and immediately noticed a small, brown bug sitting on my shoulder. As I turned my head to flick it away I saw several more crawling down my back. Naturally, I got some major heebie-jeebies and ripped my shirt off so fast you would’ve thought it was on fire.

I darted back to my room, figuring I’d accidentally left my window cracked and let some flies or gnats creep in. When I turned on the light I saw two things: (1) closed windows and (2) several dozen bugs swarming my bed and the surrounding walls. Gross, gross, gross.

I began to kill the ones I could catch, but swiftly realized they were appearing faster than I could squash them. I turned to my next best defense: the Internet. Some swift Googling revealed that I had a bed bug infestation (I know what you are thinking – ewwww)

Bed bugs are quite real. They are small (pencil eraser sized) flat insects that are nocturnal and feed on warm-blooded creatures, which certainly explains their enjoy of sleeping humans. It is rare that you catch them in action like I did, so most people detect an infestation from the bites they find on their skin. Both my roommate and I had plenty of those (she even had one on her eyelid) but made the common mistake of assuming they were simply mosquito bites. You can also look for stains on your bedding: both their droppings (small black dots typically at the edges of your mattress) and blood stains (when you roll over and “pop” one that simply drank). Gross, I know.

So how did we get bed bugs? They’ve been making a resurgence in the US lately, especially in big, transient cities like New York. Despite popular belief, an infestation is not an indication of filth, but rather a a result of increased international travel (frequently found in hotels, bed bugs come home on your suitcases and clothes) and decreased use of DDT in pesticides (assuming they were mostly gone, people stopped making chemicals to kill them). How they made it to our apartment? No one truly knows- except that our wall-to-wall carpet surely did not assist.

Unfortunately, bed bugs are notoriously hard to get rid of. We were told it frequently requires multiple applications of a pesticide to ensure the problem is gone. Our (somewhat shady) landlord was too low-cost to call a professional, so he hired a friend to spray our place with some mystery chemical in all the cracks and crevices around our apartment (this involved dismantling all of our IKEA furniture- bed bugs enjoy dowel holes!).

In addition to the pesticide treatment (which I will admit was not quite green at all- but we were getting eaten by bugs at night and our landlord wore the pants), my roommate and I had to take several steps to assist ensure that we quarantined any of the bugs that miraculously escaped the chemical treatment. This involved washing all fabrics in hot water (keep in mind this meant lugging ALL of our clothes, sheets, and towels two blocks to a laundromat) and then storing them in plastic for 2 months. Bed bugs apparently have trouble walking on slick surfaces like plastic or metal, so keeping everything in trash bags helped keep them from stowing away anywhere new. So that is why my closet looked like this for 8 weeks:

And since the bugs could still be living deep inside our mattresses, we were advised to buy plastic mattress covers (with zippers!) and leave them on until we could afford new beds. And since checking for bite marks in the morning was the only way to tell if the problem was solved, we had several unsettling nights where we in short “sacrificed” our bodies to be sucked on for the sake of seeing if they were gone. Here is a pic of me before bed one night on my sheet-less, plastic-covered bed. Despite it being summer, I covered myself in as much clothing as possible to limit my bite count. Oh, and that annoyed look is 100% intentional too.

After a couple of weeks of biteless nights, we officially declared ourselves in the clear. In the end, it had been about a 12 week ordeal. I am typically not one to freak out about bugs, but these suckers (literally) caused an insane amount of distress – from arguing with our landlord over who was responsible for treatment to eventually replacing every piece of furniture I owned (not ’til I moved out, mind you). I truly would not wish bed bugs on anyone.

But bed bugs are not the end of the world. If you find yourself infested, do your research, rely on professionals and brace yourself for a few weeks of uncomfortable living. Hopefully in the 4+ years since my ordeal their treatment methods have improved. The best treatment for bed bugs is obviously prevention. When traveling, check hotel mattresses for stains and keep your suitcase off the floor. At home, keep your carpets vacuumed and if you think you are at risk for an infestation (plenty of globetrotting guests, for instance) think about coating the feet of your bed in Vaseline or sitting them in a tin can so the bugs cannot travel from the floor to the mattress (bed bugs cannot fly, so as long as things are slippery they will not be able to bridge that gap).

Hopefully this long post has not put you to sleep. But if it did, I will hope you slept tight and did not let the… well, you know the rest.

PS: Learn how we got rid of another common household pest in our post How To Get Rid Of Fruit Flies.

Learn more about bed bugs here and here.