Hello warriors! I lurked during my first infestation over a year and a half ago and now that Satan has honored me with the privilege of seeing a bed bug in person again, I thought I'd join the fun:D
We had complete and total victory over a year and a half ago. Our infestation in our three bedroom apartment was confined to one room (mine. hashtag blessed.) and being young and ignorant, we did weird things like throw away our stuff and panic. (haha kids.) We alerted our apartment management, thinking they would assist, but instead they banned us from using the community dumpster, made us use and pay for Terminix and then lied about treating the surrounding apartments as well. Our Terminix inspector would have made an excellent ghost tours host.
She positively identified the samples we saved and then took one look at the laundry on the floors of our housemates rooms and squealed "Ewww how do they live like this? They're probably here too.", but didn't actually look. Maybe she prefers to exterminate cute and clean things instead, I don't know. She walked through the house waving her arms about. "THAT should be bagged. THOSE should be bagged. BAG ALL THE THINGS or you will be heavily fined and have bed bugs forever. Goodbye." So we bagged our whole apartment, clothes, toys, happiness and filled our kitchen with the bags. The dryer ran at all hours of the night. We slept with flashlights, rubbing alcohol and surrounded ourselves with a protective moat of tears.
When the exterminator arrived, he looked at our pretty much empty house and said "Uh..you all didn't have to do all that." He sprayed the corners of the walls delicately like we were politely spritzing them with $800 perfume and left. The bugs did not stop attacking. (just me and my partner. again hashtag blessed.) Terminix told us we'd need to wait about ten days, but they finally came back. Again, the gentleman began to cutely dab the walls, but this time we were like "NO! KILL THEM ALL! I WANT TO SMELL THE POISON! I WANT TO SMELL DEATH!" Turns out the nest had been in a painting over our bed which he would have missed had we not taken it down to be sprayed. He DRENCHED it at our request and after that we were bed big free. The End.
Prologue: The PTSD remained. We continued to check our furniture every time we received a mosquito bite. But we were free.
And now the SEQUEL. We are pretty certain that the first infestation occurred because one of us worked at the library and would bring home books that were stored by the bed. (Seriously people, paper books are overrated. Get a Kindle. It's called "Kindle" because you can go ahead and burn your books. Just kidding. Sorta.)
Recently, a friend set a library book on the bed which we removed (because we are crazy people now.)That same night, my partner received those familiar bites. While inspecting, we found an newly fed, DEAD adult. "It's so great to see you in person." I told it with my voice trembling. "I have been thinking about you and studying your pictures for almost two years and am your biggest fan." TEN days later, I woke an hour before dawn with a new bite and with a flashlight, found a stage one baby. (Achievement Unlocked! Nightmare Returns) We were going on a two day vacation the next day and didn't want them to spread so we did our DE thing, sprayed the box spring under our BB encasement, added a new encasement, sprayed the mattress, gave it a new encasement as well and pleaded with the gods to spare us.
The night we returned from our vacation, again I woke to another little baby on my arm. (Achievement Unlocked! Hello Darkness My Old Friend.) I noticed that our new encasement lacked sealant around the zippers so I fixed that. It's been three nights without further incident, but even so, we cancelled our overnight guests and dry our clothes and sheets before and after contact with the bed and intend on bagging our books and clothes to stop this nonsense early.
We spoke to an exterminator who was optimistic about our chances of dealing with the problem without his help seeing as the "infestation" is too small to even find a good identifying sample, but of course offered to help us out for the low low price of $1000:D
We've got climb ups, encasement, rubbing alcohol, double-sided tape, DE, vacuum, garbage bags, contact sprays, more natural chemicals in the mail on the way, determination, experience and love. I'm hoping to come back with a positive report and thanks to the host for these forums!