I lived in a cheap studio in Boston that was infested with roaches. Every 3-4 months I would spray Raid where the walls met the floor and that always worked well until they gradually started appearing again.
I lived in another studio that got a bedbug infestation. My building’s management paid for the place to be heat treated – they wheeled in two giant space heaters and had them powered by a generator on a truck five stories below on the street. I never saw another one again, but it destroyed all my books.
Nowadays I’m way more picky about where I live and I haven’t had any pest issues in over a decade.
Bed bugs made us burn our furniture. In the end we still paid several hundred dollars for an exterminator cause they were that persistent.
Where I live, there are American cockroaches. The good thing is that they don’t nest in homes, so their presence isn’t a commentary on your cleanliness. But they do wander into homes looking for food. And guys, they’re huge! Like you can hear them crawling.
I asked the pest control guy if there was a way to be finally rid of them and he said “move”.
Sprinkle boric acid along their runs, worked for us.
Nearly every NYC apartment has pest issues. Landlords don’t actually give a fuck about resolving them, so I end up doing most of it. I’ve had roaches, mice, and all colors of mold.
Mice are the most annoying. Unfortunately glue traps are the only traps that work on them, but I would check them often and Ol’ Yeller any stuck mice I found with a crossbow. Instant lights out.
A few years ago we had a problem with teenage girls in the bathroom. Basically made it unusable for most of the day.
Glad to say they have now graduated college and the problem worked itself out.
Ugghh. We’ve had a couple of those. Ours cleared up when sons moved out.
I’ve had fruit flies before that must have come in on some produce, have to be on it to clear them, leave out any fruit/veg scraps and they come out (out being tossed in the trash/green bin too, anything open air). Drop of dish soap, water and vinegar in a high walled glass or jar is the way to do it, I used balsamic but malt or wine vinegar works too, just leave that out and it’ll do its job.
My current place we jokingly call the spider house, have a bunch of house spiders around (cats love them) and a few orb-weavers, garden and wolf spiders outside, pretty much anything native isn’t a threat to humans or cats, they do a great job of taking out any pests, rarely see flies inside these days. Spiders and centipedes I’ll leave alone, they’re beneficial to have around.
Childhood spring one year, conditions were perfect for millipedes. The basement floor was covered in them. I mean covered with the floor barely visible.
They weren’t damaging or dangerous, just disgusting. My dad put on his outdoor shoes and just walked around in tiny steps smashing them. He walked for hours. Then scraped them up with a plastic snow shovel and threw them outdoors for the birds to go wild. Then walked some more.
No other spring since has resulted in those sorts of numbers. It was interesting to see my dad’s reaction: the disgust and fascination and satisfaction. God help him if he ever discovers pimple popper videos and the like, we would lose him to the algorithm.
This is one of the worst things I have ever read
Why, thank you. Your comment is worth more than all the upvotes.
This deserves to be in a movie. I don’t know the genre or plot, but it would be one of those scenes you never forget.
Homework assignment for a film class: design this vignette in the style of various directors, from Cronenburg body horror to Wes Anderson grief-filled comedy and color palette.
I think i would handle that with a shop vac. Suck em up, take the vac outside near the bird feeder, maybe even prime the birds with a little scattered seeds, then open the shop vac and walk briskly away
Millipedes or centipedes? I always used to get the names backwards, but centipedes are the nightmare fuel one (to my mind), lighting fast and all legs. Millipedes, the legs are less dominantly noticeable an I think of as more of a forest-floor, under-a-log kind of thing.
I just found and smashed a couple of centipedes in my house the past couple days. My reaction is instinctual and violent. It freaks me out to wonder what they’ve been eating to get so large.
Pretty sure it was millipedes. Lots of little legs that go down below the body, versus fewer legs that stick out to the side. And they smelled when squished.
Weird! Ok, I’m less horrified now.
Come to think if it, centipedes are too fast for the thing your dad did. I bet millipides are a lot crunchier though.
Old house. Mice are seasonal for us. We get one or two in the fall when they start looking for shelter for the winter, and again in the spring when they start exploring/multiplying. We used traps, Now that we have cats though, they mostly stay away or get caught.
Had a mouse issue. Found the hole where they were getting in. Couple of kill traps and blocking the hole with rodent repellent spray froam and they haven’t been in the house since.
Thankfully, only ants have been the worst we’ve had so far. Liquid ant baits take care of them in the house, while mound killer granules take care of the ones outside. There’s the occasional tiny scorpion in the house every few weeks in the summer, while the bigger scorpions and spiders sometimes show up in the garage. They’re usually easy to kill because my garage is relatively empty, so it’s easy to chase them around.
Cockroaches. It was bad. They were everywhere. You couldn’t open a door without them falling from the cracks in the doorframe on your face.
Boric acid is what helped as recommended by reddit. We used to clean, and spray with Pyrethrins before that but that only kills the visible ones. Most of the roaches are in their holes and you’ll never reach them like that.
What’s great about boric acid is that it kills slowly meaning they can infect each other before they die in a chain reaction. They infect even the hidden ones when they go groom each other.
So clean the area, dry it, then just spread the powder where they usually hang out. It’ll take a week to notice any effects. Apply again if area gets wet.
Another great thing is unless you ingest a huge amount or inhale it in your lungs, boric acid is mostly safe for humans. Unlike the sprays which always gave us symptoms.
Another satisfied customer of boric acid.
Viewed a flat on a Sunday, went ahead and rented it. Realized after moving in that all the sandwich shops serving the nearby uni Monday-Friday drew an ungodly amount of cockroaches. I hated getting up for a glass of water in the middle of the night because I knew the horror show I’d see upon entering the kitchen after dark.
Roach traps didn’t make a dent, and we had two cats so didn’t want to go in for heavy duty poisons.
Read about boric acid in a Metafilter post, spread some along the usual scurrying areas and… wow! Barely saw one ever again.
mine was these roach gel baits when we had an infestation of tiny cockroaches (around 12-15 mm in size)
just apply a pea size every 2 ft where light cant get them (and your pets), cover or hide any other food sources like trash or table scraps them bam! you’ll be sweeping swarms of dead roaches several days after.
then repeat application every 6 months
three times:
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rats - tore out two walls and a ceiling looking for their ingress. Found the hole, sealed it, took advantage of the situation to insulate and refinish the room, no problems since.
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mice - set traps while improving home infra. Raised shelves, removed things acting at mouse ladders, started keeping grains in sealed, hard-sided containers. Went around the outside of the house removing clutter and harboring plants, planted herbs that repel rodents instead. Sprayed essential oils for several weeks as a deterrent, and placed a few permanent traps as check for effectiveness. No mice in the years since.
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water roaches - boiled or threw out the items they seemed attracted to, used chemical scent obliterators on any adjacent surfaces. Placed pet-safe gel poison behind all the furniture in the kitchen. No problems since.
The joys of a fixer-upper home.
The ongoing pests are flies and birds. This summer I’ll be exposing and reinsulating the vent area above the finished attic and replacing the damaged louvers that the birds have nested in. The flies seem to crawl straight through the window sashes, though, no idea how to solve that one.
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I had a pair of foxes raise a litter of kits under my garden shed. They were so cute and fun to watch!
Well they left me with fleas. I had to seal off the foundation of the shed, cut holes in the floor, and drop some nasty pesticides (phosgene) under, and seal it back up.
Wasps nested in my walls. I sucked them out with a Vacuum then put in some insecticide.
Here is a picture of the wasps in my vacuum:
Well that’s nightmare fuel. Cudos to you for sorting it.
It was pretty bad. Every day a few wasps would find there way inside the house through lightning fixtures. I was freaking out, but some googling and advice from friends helped me sort it out. When I went outside I was able to quickly identify where they were coming in since there were so many wasps coming and going. The vacuum made them furious but they just kept attacking the nozzle and getting sucked in. Once I had sucked up the bulk of them it was safe to inject some insecticide and then eventually caulk up the entrance.
Did you use an extra long hose attachment? Wear some type of protection? That would be super scary! They can be so aggressive! We had some that chased a friend across the yard.
I wore a hoody with a mask and glasses to protect my face at first, but needed none of that. The wasps exclusively attacked the nozzle and at no point came anywgere near me.
We got Carpenter ants around the front entrance to the house one year, had to call an exterminator to spray the nest, which was outside under the front porch. Those little fuckers stuck around for weeks afterwards, which is apparently how long the poison takes to eradicate them all.
We pretty much always have mice in the attic, despite the exterminator calls and the snap-traps we set. Occasionally we catch one in the garage. They never manage to infiltrate the rest of the house because we have 5 cats and each one lives for the moment a mouse is spotted so that they can catch it and play with its barely-breathing corpse before they try to eat it. We don’t use rodent poison for that reason, just in case the cats get one.
