Reply To: Bedbugs – advice and information request from desperate family

It’s now five months since I started this thread and it’s time to provide an update.

The extermination company (name provided at end of post – mod’s discretion as to whether or not it’s edited out) came to our house and treated twice, three weeks apart. Originally it was going to be two weeks apart, but they did us a favor and delayed the second treatment for a week because we had young children in the house at the time they would have performed the second treatment. They treated all of the bedrooms and also the area in the living room around the sofas where the bedbug-sniffing dog had indicated they were present.

We all had to leave the house while the treatment was being applied, and stay out until three hours after they’d completed it. If there was any reappearance of bedbugs within two or three months (sorry, I don’t remember if it’s two or three) of the second treatment they guaranteed they’d return and treat it again for no additional charge. The guy who performed the treatment was very nice, patiently answered our questions, and gave us several bedbug interceptor traps to put under our bedposts.

In the four-plus months since our house was treated we haven’t seen any bedbugs. The bedbug interceptors have caught a few insects, but none of them were bedbugs. Since then, I have had my arm bitten up once, and one of the kids has had their leg bitten once, but we’re not sure what type of insect did the biting or where it occurred. I regularly inspect the bedding, mattresses and box springs (all encased in zippered encasements) in our house and haven’t seen any bedbug evidence since the treatment.

We hope our house is now bedbug free, but I still have the nagging worry that perhaps something was missed – hopefully that’s just my nervousness. (The fact the we never saw an actual bedbug in our house adds to the overall uncertainty – if we had seen them before and now they were gone there would be more of a feeling of conclusive finality.) We regularly have guests on Shabbos and there’s always a possibility that they may bring additional unwanted “guests”, we never know if we may have picked up an unwanted “hitchhiker” from the office, school, or subway, so there’s never a guarantee there won’t be a (c”v – al tiftach peh) recurrence.

We’re basically satisfied with the extermination company we hired and the online reviews posted by their customers are overwhelmingly positive. The name of the company is Beach Pest Control.

I sincerely hope none of you need this type of information – it’s an expensive, aggravating, time-and-effort-consuming headache – but if you ever do so, hopefully some of the information provided in this thread is helpful.

Once again, thanks to all those who took the time to chime in with their own experience and suggestions, whether professional or not, above.