Thank the Baby Jesus Montclair is Bedbug Free (knock wood)
As nightmares go, the NYC bedbug epidemic is top on my list and now that New York Magazine has run this excellent article on the Upper East Side’s secret service exterminators, I love New Jersey suburbs more than ever before. Granted, I’m not so naive to think that we will remain bedbug free, they will come here with all the other migrating families. But for now I am glad to feel safe and unbitten in Montclair.
I have a friend who is so obsessed and fearful of her home in Dobbs Ferry being infested she has laid down some very strict rules that after reading the article now sound like common sense:
She won’t allow anyone who lives in NYC, SF or LA to spend the night at her home. These cities all have bedbug epidemics.
She won’t stay in a hotel in any of these cities.
She won’t ride the subway.
She won’t shop at estate sales, ever. Bedbugs can live in wood. They can burrow into your phone and you have to painstakingly steam clean, chuck or burn everything in order to get rid of them.
“Everything had to go. Margaret recalls a “special company wearing what looked like hazmat suits.” The men removed everything that couldn’t be dry-cleaned—rugs, books, luggage, paintings, shoes, toys, computers, even radios. Only simple, hard-surfaced items, like china and silverware (which even bedbugs can’t burrow into), remained in the apartment.”
Other things you should know but people don’t tell you or talk about:
Bed bugs have an odor (how freaked out are you now!)
Pest Away, a firm mentioned in the peice, receives between 50 and 75 calls about bedbugs from the Upper East Side every week—and that’s just one firm.
Bedbugs tend to bite in threes—either in a line or in a triangle. In the article is says, “In exterminator jargon, this pattern is known as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” They have been known to leave triangular shaped bites on victim’s foreheads.
And now for some service: The number one way to turn a problem into an infestation:
If you have them in your mattress get rid of your mattress. Don’t move to the couch. If you move to the couch, they will move to your couch and infest your whole apartment. According to my friend, “they just want to stay with the food source.”
May 5th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Living in a huge rent-stabilized tenement in Brooklyn for the last seven years, I was eternally TERRIFIED of bedbug infestation.
Did you know they will drop off the ceiling to get you? fucking yikes.
I resolved this fear with one simple step I learned from a friend whose family suffered a horrible infestation. White sheets. You bleed when bedbugs bite you. If you have all white bedlinens, you will be able to tell the moment they arrive and deal with them before they become an epidemic.
May 5th, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Yes! Their drop down from the ceiling tactic is mentioned in the article or in a reader comment. I am entirely over living in New York.
May 6th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
We were early trendsetters on the bedbug thing nearly six years ago. It was a NIGHTMARE. We have a plastic thingie around our mattress and our son’s mattress now. And we use the white powder they glossed over in the article. It’s nontoxic and has been proven to kill them because it scratches their nasty little bodies like broken glass.
AGHGHGHGH! They are THE worst.
May 8th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
like i didn’t have enough to worry about! you have cured me of yard sales, bulk day, library “fill your bags with used books” sales. ugh…so awful!
May 24th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Um, Bed bugs ARE in Montclair, you just don’t know about them. The apartment building on my block has had to exterminate more than once!