Furniture That Only Moves Down One Staircase
Bed bugs do not arrive from the drains, the back alley or the hedges along the cemetery boundary. Something has to carry them through a front door, and in a house split into flats that something is usually a piece of furniture which never leaves the address at all. A bed frame goes up to the top flat; a sofa comes down to the ground floor because nobody upstairs has the space; a chest of drawers stands in the hall for a fortnight in between. Each journey is short enough that nobody opens a joint and looks first.
The Week a Flat Changes Hands
The days between one occupant and the next are the best chance you will get: the room is emptied onto the landing and the bed is already stripped. Work along the piping round the mattress, the bolt holes and slat ends of the frame, the back face of a headboard and the underside of anything upholstered. If a household is moving on to Queen’s Park or Kilburn, ten minutes in daylight also stops the problem being delivered to the next address. How bed bugs get into a home runs through the other routes.
A Yard, a Cellar or a Front Path Used as a Staging Post
Bulky things stand about for days before anyone decides what to do with them: on the tiled front path beside the bins, out in the back yard, or at the foot of the cellar steps. Weather does not clear a mattress of bed bugs and neither does a fortnight in the open, so an item left by the gate deserves no more trust than one carried straight indoors. The guide to bed bugs in sofas and furniture shows what to look at, out on the path rather than in the bedroom.
Visitors, Sofa Beds and Nights on the Floor
The other way into a flat here is a person rather than a van. A relative stays a fortnight, a sleepover finishes with three mattresses down on a bedroom floor, a sofa bed is opened for the first time in a year. Once anyone has stayed, wash the bedding as hot as the label allows and look along the seams of whatever they slept on before it is folded away.
Checking a Bay-Fronted Bedroom
Front bedrooms in these terraces give you a bay, a deep skirting and a cupboard beside the chimney breast, which means more places to search than a modern room and more excuses to stop early. Begin at the bed all the same, in daylight with the bedding off: mattress seams and labels, frame joints, the back of the headboard, then the carpet edge nearest the bed and the skirting behind it. What you want is dark spotting like pen ink, pale shed skins and living insects. The first signs guide and where they hide during the day show both. Bites settle almost nothing by themselves: marks round the ankles in a carpeted room may be fleas, and an itchy rash with nothing whatever on the bed can come from carpet beetle larvae.
Getting a Kensal Green Room Ready
- Wash bedding and the clothes off the bedroom floor as hot as the label allows, then keep them sealed in bags until the rooms have been dealt with
- Bag things where they stand rather than carrying armfuls across a shared hallway
- Clear the floor under the bed and ease wardrobes off the wall so the edges of the room can be reached
- Carry on sleeping in your own bed: moving to the sofa simply gives you a second room to have treated
- Leave shop foggers and aerosols alone, since they drive bugs into the wall and towards the flat next door
We will say exactly what is wanted for your rooms when you book, and the room preparation guide gives the general shape of it. A mattress very rarely has to go, so ask before anything is carried down a shared stair, which is a reliable way to leave bugs on a landing on the way out — this guide explains the thinking.
Booking, and What Happens Afterwards
Tell us how many rooms have signs, whether the home is a flat over a shop, a flat inside a converted terrace or a whole house let room by room, whether it came furnished, and whether anybody else in the building has bites. Tenants should pass on the landlord or agent's details so nothing stalls. Afterwards, keep looking at the same places you looked at first. How quickly things settle depends on the rooms and on how long the bugs had been established, which how long bed bug treatment takes goes into properly. If you are still being bitten once the period we give you has passed, ring us.
Keeping Them Out of a Converted Terrace
- Look over any bed, sofa or drawer unit from elsewhere in the building before it is carried into a bedroom, not after
- When a room changes hands, strip the bed back to the frame and check the joints
- Unpack a suitcase onto a hard floor after a trip and send the clothes to the machine
- Once the bugs are dealt with, ask the freeholder to fill obvious gaps around pipes and sockets on a party wall
Landlords and agents letting rooms here can book directly; give us a contact for the tenant and the number of affected rooms. Bed Bug Control Brent sets out how the service runs across the borough, the Brent advice on finding bed bugs is worth forwarding to a neighbour, and everything else these buildings get is on Pest Control Kensal Green.
