They aren't going away, arrgh! « Got Bed Bugs? Bedbugger Forums

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They aren't going away, arrgh!

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midnightline

newbite
Joined: May '09
Posts: 1

Posted 5 months ago
Sun May 31 2009 15:33:26
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Hi there,

I'm new to these forums, although not new to the bedbug problem.

Back about mid-January I discovered a small insect crawling on the wall of my apartment one night. After capturing it, I looked it up on the web, and it turned out to be a bedbug. I reported it to the apartment office...

Their response was, "Ahh, yup, looks like a bedbug. The people below you have them too." So I was scheduled for bi-weekly treatment with their regular exterminator. Here I am, 4.5 months later, and I still have issues...

Some details:
I was never told the apartment building had bedbugs until I reported it to the office. Whenever I ask the office if any of the surrounding apartments have bedbugs, I get "Nobody else is reporting them."
The people next to me moved out a month or two ago, and apparently they had a heavy infestation. The exterminator asserts that he's "seen no signs of infestation" lately.
There was a period of about a month and a half where I did not see any bedbugs on the walls, but I did keep getting bites. Both the apartment staff and the exterminator were trying to get me to say the problem had been taken care of. I started to wonder if it was all in my head, and even got to the point where I agreed they could stop treatment unless new pests showed up -- and then I found a new bedbug that very night.
Months ago, the apartment below me that had them originally was supposedly successfully treated. Earlier this week I saw them moving out, and they were throwing sofas, mattresses, and pillows in the dumpster -- with everything ripped so as to be unusuable.

Long and short of it, I don't believe the exterminator's efforts are sufficient. I don't believe a sufficient radius of apartments are being treated (just the ones that complain on their own), and my lease renewal is coming up.
If I move, I either have to throw away everything, risk taking the bugs with me and thus infest a new place, or stash everything in storage for a year and a half. I've already had to shove everything in closets and cupboards so that the exterminator can treat, and even that's frustrating -- I can't really live in my apartment. Yet, I don't really want to live in a place where there are bedbugs that could resurface at any time.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I should do? I'm in Colorado, so there are laws that state the landlord needs to provide "appropriate extermination", but how do I prove that they're not? Has anybody been through this before and can give me a feel for how things went?
natalie

newbite
Joined: May '09
Posts: 13

Posted 5 months ago
Sun May 31 2009 16:51:29
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I'm going through it right now. Sucks. I'm just throwing stuff away, but I also would like a better alternative.