StressedMama135 on "I'm just barely away from seeing one more bug before I burn it all down!"

Nah, I wouldn't seriously burn my house down... but let me tell you.. we have been dealing with a bed bug problem for almost exactly FOUR YEARS! and that's only going from when we discovered we had them!
A family friend's ex-wife passed away and he had nowhere to stay with his 4 daughters while he worked on getting his own place. I discovered the bed bugs by accident (was watching something on my tablet and saw something crawling across the bed) the night before they moved out! (This was in late summer 2012!) I was freaking out as I had been all night when they got up and started packing their stuff. The oldest girl (17 y/o) asked my daughter what was wrong and my daughter told her and what does the oldest girl say? "Oh we had those at my mom's" (all the tons of crap they brought into my house had came from their mom's!) We used DE in the beginning, but I totally did it wrong bc I didn't do any research at all. A friend had recently told me she had gotten rid of a bad infestation using DE alone and only told me *some* of the places I should have used the DE without going into much detail how. I did the DE way too thick. Next we tried various types of sprays from local hardware stores and whatnot. Mattress encasements, "traps" .. looking back, we were pretty clueless about what we were doing and working with a very limited income. They would seem to go away for a while as if we had finally found something that worked, only to come back even worse! This went on for quite some time. By early fall 2014, I was barely even sleeping. The bugs were everywhere. No matter if I tried to sleep in my bed, or on the couch, or on the floor, I would just wake up within a few hours because I could seriously FEEL the bugs crawling on my skin - rush to the bathroom and flip the light on and there'd be so many I wouldn't even count crawling on my clothes. It made me feel like the absolute nastiest person in the world. I would pick off all that I could see. Get undressed, check to see if there was any others to pick off (and flush down the toilet) and take a long hot shower just to feel somewhat clean. This happened for months..... How I survived all that time on so little sleep and constantly freaking out is beyond me. Our income was even more limited by this time due to some unfortunate circumstances. I had already done quite a bit of research by this point. I knew they were incredibly bad. I knew (from what I read and was told) that having a heat treatment would be our best, safest, and most effective method of getting rid of them. I had already gotten some quotes for a heat treatment from the two or three (out of many more) professionals I had called. I went crying and begging to everyone in the family who I thought may even possibly be able to loan us the $2000 something for the heat treatment, and couldn't find anyone that could help. I finally asked my oldest's son "grandpa" and he said he would let us borrow the money. The relief just from knowing that our nightmare was almost over was unexplainable. We got everything set up and our house was heat treated in November 2014. We have a full basement with the exception of a crawl space under an extension on our house. Was told the norm was for the basement to be chemically treated unless there was furniture and whatnot where we spent time regularly and could have tracked bugs. (our basement is purely storage and laundry.) So this was done in Nov 2014. They showed up and got everything started around 8am or so and by 4-5pm, we were coming back in the house. That night, I slept 15 hours straight. It was the best sleep I had gotten in a very long time. About a week later I woke up, and what do I see on my arm? A very itchy red spot. Bed bug bite. I called the professionals that had done the heat treatment since there was a 30 day guarantee. We got set up to have a second heat treatment done. This time, I did not have anywhere to take my pets, so we stuck them all in the basement. Told the pros the pets were in the basement so they would not be able to retreat (which they said they hadn't planned to anyways unless we had seen anything down there, which we never had). Again, they showed up around 8am or so, but this time they were packed up and gone by around 330pm. With the second heat treatment, our 30 day guarantee restarted. I checked everything, every day. Couldn't find any bugs at all. Sure enough after about 6 weeks, I found a bug. I called and basically I was told that they would be happy to re-treat the house but we would have to pay the $2000 something all over again" umm, no. I couldn't do it and I could not ask to borrow the money again when I knew it was already going to be hard to repay the money we had borrowed to begin with. A lot of time passed, no more bugs were found even though I searched high and low. Long story short - here it is - June 2016 - and while they are nowhere near as bad as when we had the first heat treatment done in 2014, they are bad enough. I have sprayed the house - no, I have **soaked** the house -- two times using just temprid. Recently sprayed a third time using a mixture of temprid with gentrol. When I sprayed this past time, I discovered where the bugs were hiding in my children's rooms - the beds! They had like -- captain beds -- I went to move my daughter's bed and one of the slats fell out (cheaply made) and what do I see? bugs. eggs. everything bed bugs. they were on the screws, in the home from the screws. I started ripping her bed apart and I'm going to guess it was in the upper hundreds between bugs and eggs alone. That bed immediately went straight outside and to the trash. Before I even finished her bedroom, I went to my sons' bedrooms since my youngest had the same type of bed. Started ripping his bed apart (already was planning on throwing it out due to how bad my daughter's bed was) and even more, although not quite as bad as my daughter's bed had been. That went straight outside too. So now, for the moment, they just have mattresses on the floor. The night before all this happened, I had went in my daughter's room and I must have killed 30-50 bugs over about a 30 minute period that were climbing all over the walls. The night after I sprayed and threw the bed out - not one single bug. So, although I know without a doubt that throwing the beds out didn't eliminate the problem completely, it made a significant difference very quickly! This all happened on Tuesday this past week. I gave the house a little over 24 hours to thoroughly dry from the spray and was still seeing some bugs that were acting perfectly normal, esp on my husband's light tan colored recliner in the living room where even the smallest ones are easily spotted. That night, I remembered about DE. I did some research and watched some videos as to how to *dust* with it and decided it wouldn't hurt to put a layer of backup on top of the residue that the spray supposedly leaves. I started the DE on Wednesday night with my husband's light tan colored recliner. I completely covered it. Inside and out. I found one bug on the chair in a seam a few hours after I finished the chair and no matter what I did, I couldn't get the bug to so much as budge. I killed it anyways and here it is early Sunday morning and I have not seen any bugs on that chair since then. I have since gotten most of the rest of my house and furniture and everything else I can think of (such as bottoms of dresser and nightstand drawers) dusted with DE. I still have a few things to do (such as taking off electric outlets and getting DE dusted inside) but for the most part, I am finished. Although, with the exception of the recliner, I have only found one bug in my house - on my bathroom ceiling - since I sprayed, and none since I started dusting with the DE. While the DE I have put down is a thin layer, it is visible to the eye. Tonight I read that the layer should be so thin that its barely visible (or not visible at all) to the naked eye. Should I clean it all up and start over again???
I cannot even put an amount on how much money we have spent on this crap since first finding out we had them. The original DE, numerous different types of "cheap" chemicals, numerous mattress encasements for a total of 5 beds, the heat treatment (2k something alone), we have replaced all of the beds and the couch, replaced the vacuum several times, more DE, the temprid and gentrol + a 1 gallon sprayer for those. and various other things. altogether, this whole thing has probably cost us well over $5,000 -- probably closer to 10k!!! and although I'm not currently finding bugs - I am convinced they are here - just hiding and waiting - and I really do not know what else to do! I feel like we have exhausted resources. I do not have money for a professional to come in and do yet another heat treatment. (I have since learned that with the 2 heat treatments that were done, they did not let the house heat nearly as long as they should have!!!) Before I started the temprid/gentrol sprays myself (I knew which chemicals to use, since I still have the documents from the heat treatments which stated everything they did, including what chemicals they used in the basement), I did have a few professional quotes and asked many questions and am certain I was just as thorough, if not more, than they would have been for way more money than I was able to get the spray for and do it myself. I know the sprays helped some - I found a lot of dead bugs!!! But I also came across a lot of live ones that I had to kill myself. Retrying the DE is my last attempt before I give some serious thought into just burning my house down and starting over. So far, so good. But considering its been less than a week and how long bed bugs can live in hiding without feeding, I do not feel like I'm anywhere close to being able to say they are gone. I am debating if I need to clean up the DE dusting I have done as it is quite visible and everything I have found tonight says it shouldn't be visible hardly at all. What do you think? It would really suck to have to do that, but I cannot emphasize enough how much I absolutely NEED this to work! My plans are to leave the DE down for - well, forever, even once I'm convinced the bugs are gone - I never in my life, ever, can go through this again. So, I want to leave the DE as a preventative measure once the bugs are for certain gone. Like I said, I have done pretty much the whole house except for taking outlets off and applying the DE in those. That is getting done today. and I had planned on going over my house again to making sure I missed absolutely nothing, but now, I want to see if I should clean up and apply an even thinner dusting first or what I should do. I have read they will not notice it and will crawl right through it unless it is really thick. I have also read they will see it and not go through it at all unless its just that barely-visible to the human eye dusting. So, someone, anyone, please someone who has successfully treated with DE, give me some guidance here. I'm willing to do whatever I need to do as long as it will work! I do have some pictures of some of the areas I have dusted, but I would only be able to send through facebook or email from my phone. I really just need some help here because four years is four years too long to have dealt with this crap. TIA for any help, advice, suggestions, whatever you can help me out with here.