Contact Neighbours and Landlord.
So you have had a few sleepless nights worrying about every tickle and itch you feel on your body. You have found evidence that you do have unwelcome bedbug guests in your home. You are now wondering how you can possibly handle this situation. Will you have to move out? Get rid of all your stuff? Clean every single thing you own? Will the infestation last a long time?The good news is that you won’t have to get rid of all your stuff or move out. In fact, you really shouldn’t. The bad news is yes, everything you own will be put under scrutiny and yes, it can and will last a long time unless you succeed in destroying every last bug and egg in your home.
Once an infestation has been confirmed, these are the first three measures to take to get rid of the bugs.
Step One
Plan A: Get organizing! You will need to systematically get everything in your house sterile, but you also need to find out where the bedbugs are (don’t assume they are just in the sheets of your bed). You will have to launder everything that can be laundered at least once, and dried in a HOT dryer for at least 10 minutes. Afterwards, the newly sterile items need to be bagged and sealed.Therefore, you will need to make sure you have plenty of laundry soap and giant Ziploc-type bags, or vacuum seal bags (even better and they save space!) Since your clothes will need to be kept sterile for a few months after your apartment is treated, you might as well invest in a few of the good garment-sized vacuum sealed bags.
Plan B: If you have convinced yourself that there’s no way you can sleep at home knowing you have bugs in your bed(perhaps you have an important day coming up and you absolutely need to sleep) the LAST thing you want to do is contaminate the bed you sleep in that night. So if you must vacate your home for the night, anything you take with you needs to be washed in hot water and dried in HOT water, and/or microwave everything you need to take (school books, papers for work, etc). This means everything. Your shoes, your bag, everything.
Note: You’ll need to resort to Plan A soon enough. As in, the very next day.
Step Two
Get a spray bottle and some rubbing alcohol and start disinfecting everything. Get a steam cleaner if you can and start steaming. Vacuum like a mad Stepford wife. Microwave things that can be microwaved, put books in the oven. Please remain calm during this phase so you don’t do anything too irrational...the last thing you would want is to cause an accident or a fire (although that would get rid of the bedbugs).
This will not totally rid you of your problem; this is merely preparation for pest control.
Call pest control and make sure they have experience with bedbugs. They will probably tell you how they want you to be prepared when they get there, so the above steps are crucial. Be organized, or they can’t do their job properly.
Step Three
If you are a renter, contact your landlord. Tell him about the problem and ask him if other tenants are experiencing bedbugs as well. He should pay to have the building you live in treated by pest control, but he may not be legally obliged. Inform your neighbours (never a fun task, but necessary). There’s no use de-bugging your home if your neighbours don’t as well, because bedbugs will just find a way of crawling back.
The information about bed bugs that I have researched, collected is to help the growing numbers of bed bug sufferers.