roaches

this doesn't sound very pet-friendlily

i came home and went into the bathroom and there was one crawling on my toothbrush :( i boiled the toothbrush for like 15 minutes but i don;t know if i can use it. i have now seen 4 since moving in yesterday, but what about the ones that are there that i don't DONT SEE ":(

welcome to your new apartment!

It's their apartment too!

the human mouth has more germs than 72,000 cockroaches

they are all going to die.

Possibly not totally pet-safe, but mix 4 parts borax, 2 parts flour, and 1 part cocoa powder and pour in a continuous line around your baseboards, putting extra under the sink/in cupboards. They eat it and die, but it takes a week or two.

btw, that makes a mess if it gets wet. You could just use plain borax, but they don't like it so much.

I use 1 part strychnine to 3 parts hemlock to 1.5 parts laudenum to 10 nacho cheese, seems to work. doesn't kill pets but they can get addicted to it.

i will do what i need to. i'm going to see if i can get my landlord to spray, and have my cat stay with a friend. my cat is pretty dumb and im worried she'll eat the poison if i mix it with cocoa powder :/

http://mog.com/images/users/13721/1165622103.pjpeg

I bought some of those little "roaches walk into plastic thing that is full of yummy poison they bring back to nest & they all die and so do the babies." If you put them all under the sink, behind your fridge & oven, in the bathroom cupboard, etc., yr kitty will probably not nom nom nom (like my dog did to one of them---that was kind of a heart attack night full of forced vomiting). They did the trick in a little over a week.

Fortunately they haven't killed the sudden explosion of baby geckos in our house!

i'm going to get a bunch of those traps tomorrow. also, probably spackling/resealing a bunch of little crevasses in the bathroom. i feel like they always show up when the apt has been vacant for awhile (and the prev tenants were slobs) so i think me and my minor ocd will eradicate them

Lindsay, make sure you get the egg killer traps as well. Wash the floor with soap and bleach, then throw down tons of traps. Keep everything super clean and they'll die fast.

You can do it. I mananged to wipe them out in a month in an apartment where they would come out by the hundreds if you sprayed a doorframe.

oh, nice. yeah these little dudes are getting shut down by whatever means necessary.

also dust everything under your appliances where the cat can't go with borax

egg killers = the best ever

To keep them from coming in through the pipes, make sure to keep your drains plugged when you're not using them.

If you live above a restaurant, you really should talk to your landlord; I was unable to completely rid my apartment of cockroaches until my landlord started paying for regular exterminator visits downstairs.

laying down regular poison over thresholds and where pipes come in can help with that sort of thing too

yeah i think happy wok chinese restaurant downstairs has a lot to do with this!

my cat is on the hunt though, it looks like. she was chasing SOMETHING last night anyways :/

otherwise my new apt is really nice!

Abbott, don't kill the geckos!

So if I *see* one, that means there are, like, hundreds, right? When I had my termite treatment last year they added the all-inclusive pest-killer for a reduced rate. I hadn't seen any until a couple of weeks ago. Now I see one in the same spot in my kitchen every so often. I fear it's representative of a multitude of the little fuckers.

Fortunately they haven't killed the sudden explosion of baby geckos in our house!

they're there for the roaches, most likely. i knew some people in florida who kept one or two in their kitchen for just that reason.

To keep them from coming in through the pipes, make sure to keep your drains plugged when you're not using them.
[...]
If you live above a restaurant, you really should talk to your landlord

both of these are 100% right. get it done now, especially if these are the smaller german cockroaches. those things are a nightmare, apparently.

So if I *see* one, that means there are, like, hundreds, right? When I had my termite treatment last year they added the all-inclusive pest-killer for a reduced rate.

i don't think that's necessarily the case (it makes for a good, terror-inducing commercial). but if you turn on your light at night and see more than one scurry away you've got a problem.

The egg killer traps are not the same as the usual traps?

Also, they hate crushed-up bay leaves FWIW. It doesn't kill them but they don't want to go near it. It doesn't hurt to sprinkle some around the back of your food shelves. Citrus also repels, I hear?

We're having a bad problem this summer. Traps are helping but not totally. We can't really do the boric acid thing-- we have two dogs and it is somewhat toxic.

mix 1 part borax, 1 part baking soda, and 20 parts sulphuric acid. rub all over your skin. those pesky roaches shouldn't bother you any more.

you forgot the plutonium.

BTW, anybody who gets a horripilation from reading this thread should NOT EVER watch the "Caves" chapter of BBC's "Planet Earth".

Saw baby one yesterday and fucking HUGE one today. So big that when I first HEARD it crawling around I thought we might have a mouse. We have an exterminator that visits the building once a month and asks if we want him to spray. Problem is when I say no and other people do it I have a weird feeling they wind up fleeing to our apartment. Could be wrong but seems like that somehow.

https://www.soundstagedirect.com/media/metallica_kill_em_all_45.jpg

Ugh, heard another one. It stopped once I started moving though. Why are shits that are so harmless so fucking scary?

Cause now I know he's out there and I'm just waiting.

fucking roaches man

am i right in believing that its my landlords responsibility to eradicate this infestation

yes

man i clean this house every goddamn day

why are you here you little fuckers

how many you got?

OH MAX

I am so sorry. Bugs make me need to hide in a hermetically sealed box.

just saw our third in about as many weeks

everyone chill max is just on pcp

i dont really know whats "normal" for nyc, so maybe im just being whiny

/ on pcp

are they big ones or small ones

we get a lot of small ones, I sorta stopped caring

There's been a palmetto bug in our kitchen for like a month, if it's the same one. It creeps steathily out at night and then hides behind the skirting board at the bottom of the dishwasher when I approach. I feel somewhat betrayed by the dishwasher, tbh, since it's supposed to be an instrument of comfort.

cleaning seems to have zero correlation w/ them

i had to hose down the side of the huse where the room is cuz there was legit a 6 foot spider web stretched across the window that was freaking the shit out of me

house**

theyre big. ari flipped out

tried a quick google but couldnt find it but we had them a couple of years ago when we first moved into our place and used 'the gel' which worked really well & our place was infested with them...

we had to be meticulous about keeping food sealed/away but tbh i have no idea what role that played. but the gel! it works really well

oh man now I'm remembering going to school the day after the exterminators would come by and set off roach bombs. so many dead roaches littering the stairwells, basements. all on their backs.

I just broke a 12 month lease after living in the apartment for one day. And I wasn't even living in it yet. I signed my lease, got the key, and checked out the place for five minutes, counted about ten live german roaches, went immediately back to the leasing office to complain.

They sent out a pest control person that same day. As the pest control person was spraying around, he opened the cabinets under the kitchen sink - a place I hadn't checked yet - and saw hundreds of roaches. He sprayed and killed them all, but said it could get a lot worse before it got better. Depressing.

Later that evening, as I was naively hoping the man was wrong and it the problem was fixed, I started to move some odds and ends in the apartment. I saw about 20 more live roaches spread throughout the apartment, and that's when it hit me: I will not live here for one day no matter what it does to my credit. I called off my movers, went to the leasing office the next day, demanded both my rent back and to be free of the lease. I was lucky; my landlord was very reasonable. The only thing she said was "the last tenant never complained about roaches." That blew my mind.

I barely escaped a living nightmare. Now I'm paranoid about the next apartment I decide to rent from. At least now I know not to sign a lease without a thorough inspection for signs of infestation; I just always assumed people with roach problems were filthy slobs, as that was my experience has been visiting some friends' apartments from college.

i *always* look under the sinks when i'm checking a place out!

We had a not-terrible-but-fairly-bad roach problem this past summer, but those bait traps seemed to do the trick, although they really took a month before I stopped seeing them.

didn't change them every 3 months tho so I'm sure they'll be back soon, but I've got one of those gel things ready for those fuckers

xpost

Yeah, lesson learned. I just never experienced a bug problem before.

i've never seen one here but once in a while i find one disembodied roach because my trusty cat kills them and leaves them

fucker who lived above me died and while doing renovations on his apt they moved a whole roach nest down to my place

my cats used to do shit but now they dont (the dude who died was really old btw, he died in his sleep)

That sucks. I've done a lot of research this past week, and most people swear by those Max Force bait dispensers. It apparently takes a few weeks before it really starts killing the fuckers off, but it'll wipe out the whole nest if applied correctly.

This video seems helpful in how to apply said bait:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kSzVucMtA0

:(

The landlord is coming over to spray this evening, we have only seen maybe half a dozen live ones in a month and about as many dead ones, rly hoping this is easily taken care of.

Should say the ppl that lived there before were quite obviously complete slobs & we've tried to be vigilant about cleaning but seeing one on a stack of dinner plates in the cabinet was the last straw.

had you already tried those bait traps? Not sure if they work on bigger infestations but I was able to rid my house of them with just the traps over a few months.

feel you though - roaches are groooooss

mutilation outta sight

Yeah put out a few traps and sprayed some store-bought stuff last night but we really feel like this is the landlord's responsibility & he seems to be stepping up to fix things.

Just reading through this thread and some wikihow stuff & have realized that our leftover moving materials (cardboard, packing material) that have been sitting around for the past few weeks are probably not a good idea. Now my skin crawls thinking about picking it up to take it out to the trash and stirring up tons of the little shits.

one time during our roach problem I put my shoe on and felt what seemed to be a sticker or small item in my shoe then I turned it upside down and a roach came flying out.

why do dogs rub against dead roaches?

fetish

Now that we've moved, I can tell you that the last building we lived in had some renters who brought a whole bunch of roaches with them. We had to evict the renters (for other reasons), and then afterwards when we went in to clean/inspect the damage. When we opened the door to the unit, there were tons of roaches scurrying eeeeeeverywhere -- walls, floor, door, everywhere roaches-- and some of them went into the hallway and made a break for it. We had to have the whole building sprayed after that. The kid who came to do the bug spraying was like 21 and had just come home from serving in the Marines. I asked if pest control was difficult work and he responded plainly, "this is nothing."

You're gonna be ok!

1. move into apartment with dirty scummy previous tenants
2. collect roaches
3. profit!

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-c1-china-cockroach-20131015-dto,2669,4433405.htmlstory

(actually ours are definitely losing the battle - have only seen 2 in the past week and a half, both met very quick ends)

as soon as I post to this thread, I start seeing baby roaches again. my guess is that they all went into hiding when my brother fogged the place a few months ago.

got more bait traps, but this time I got liquid bait! going to see if it works, usually does.

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE YOU MISERABLE MOTHERFUCKERS

we were on such a good run, too :(

Ugh! Like neaderthal says, I think they show up in generational waves? So it takes a few cycles to get them all. So sorry.

Fwiw, we had an exterminator spray the baseboards and the outside wall of the backyard with serious stuff a couple of times over the summer bc of ants, but he said it's the same chemical they use for roaches. Kept our visitor count lower than ever before. Not very many sightings all summer and at least two were already dying when they showed themselves, so it worked.

I think in my case, esp if I used bait traps, I'd go a few weeks without seeing em, and then one would pop up, and then another few weeks, and suddenly, nothing. hopefully that's all it is.

since I've used the liquid bait this time, the only roach we found was dead. fuckin taunted that little motherfucker I did.

We don't have little house roaches, I should point out--when I say "visitors" I mean the bigger American cockroaches/palmetto bugs.

ewwwww. actually those were what I had LAST year - the humongo kind (and one that flew, I think?).

this last time, they were just babies that I found. sadly they did not realize I am the Roachbane.

moved into my new place and there were little babies crawlin around and then I brought out the Harris Roach Tablets and these fuckers showed themselves (though I only saw mama once). were eating up the slow kill poison like hotcakes though. caused me to flip out a little and then I got the exterminator out here thanks to my apartment having one as part of the lease, and he showed up and made a few applications and the corpses started piling up.

I've never been so happy to see dead vermin. I leaned over to one roach who was shuffling off on his back and whispered "I'm glad you're dead" into his ear.

with that being said I'm sure I'll need another exterminator visit but apparently they're all free so *shrug*

Anybody else used electrical pest-warding-off devices? We have a bunch of them, basically one in every room (two in the living room) - you plug them into wall outlets and they emit an electronic vibration that humans can't hear but that drives bugs insane, so they stay away. Since we've been using them, I've only had one giant roach in the apartment - it was in the living room and behaving very erratically, climbing around on a high shelf like it wanted to escape the room by any means necessary, and then flutter-flying down to the carpet (UGH THE HORROR, I'm shuddering just remembering it), where I sprayed it to death.

hmm. never heard of those. how expensive are they?

found a few more dead babies in various stages of development overnight in the kitchen and bathroom. alleviating my anxiety somewhat, but I'm thinking I'll probably need a second treatment in two weeks anyway just to be safe.

finding em dead finds me weirdly over satisfied.

hmm. never heard of those. how expensive are they?

Not that expensive. You can buy them at Home Depot.

cool. will maybe try that if these fuckers don't shuffle off.

I just stepped on a dead one with my bare foot. I'm going to be sick. but at least it was dead. and small. the babies don't scare me as much. definitely seeing less activity and more corpses. glad to see even the littlest of little babies dying.

they're showing up deader and deader. the worst is if you have eye floaters like me, you become convinced you're seeing bugs everywhere out of your peripheral. and I've had these in my eyes for decades.

my god the names we use

barely been seeing anything but babies lately (though saw one intermediate sized tonight). but there are also the occasional corpses from the residual poison. guessing I'll need a second treatment to 'finish them off' but it definitely is better than it was.

on the plus side, leading me to keep the place clean for the first time in my life.

housesitting this week. noticed a baby roach in the garage yesterday after a rain. tonight I walk in and find three-four enormous American roaches chillin' about. ew ew ew no no.

the Germans in my apt are all fuckin dead tho and have been since not long afer the last post.

did you kill them or did you scoop them up in your cup of a hand and walk them out 400 feet into the woods into a prepared roach re-integration zone?

I grilled them

+3HP

there was a time growing up when my dad became disappointed when it became clear that i was never going to be a real man, so for a while i tried to impress him by doing things that i thought were really tough. i caught a spider and trapped it inside a clear NES game case. it was a rental case i accidentally stole from movie gallery, i think. i trapped the spider in there and showed it to my dad, and then i added water into it and drowned the spider there and showed my dad again. i remember noticing that he did not look pleased and that i knowing that i shouldn't do that again

never fully eradicated them from my old place. so I moved into an uninfested house with a super cool hippie live-in landlord.

My lease said I had to restore the apartment to the state that it was in when I moved in,so I left the two dead roaches I found in the sink when I turned in my key.

You had them stored away?

haha nah. they had just turned up during my cleaning and I opted not to dispose of them. they can do it.

the infestation is so bad in that community that people have found them IN THEIR CAR

OP: Diatomaceous earth. Basically diatom skeletons from old seabeds, with all the calcemic and silicate spicules that get under arthropod skins, especially at their joints, piercing them till they bleed to death from hemolymph loss. Just spread it out around the floor perimeter, especially behind baseboards if there's gaps. Pet friendly.

I bought some for sticking incense sticks in, but decided it didn't work as well as rice. But its kept my apartment remarkably insect free.

helps with fleas, too, I think. if you've got pets.

so my new apt community doesn't really have a problem. our house is clean, and other than a two month period where we had messy hoarder neighbors, we haven't had them.

but....as anybody who knows me would tell you, I frequently trash my car. it starts when I take a trip to Tampa, have a bunch of caffeinated drinks on the way, and throw them on the floor, and then don't dispose of them. anyway, earlier this year, when my mental health was cratering, I let a lot of trash accumulate in my passenger seat...and thanks to that, I got roaches in my car.

instead of using the usual treatments, I read through at home options I could use, and found this spray called Shockwave, which is something exterminators use in addition to their professional chemicals. contains Insect Growth Regulator, as well as two adulticides, and a flushing agent to draw them out. but this product is for home use, doesn't require a sprayer. it's just an aerosol spray.

within two days of using this shit, they've been turning up dead, and the residual spray is also killing them. sooooo if you got any creepy crawlies, I recommend this shit, you can get it on Amazon.

going back to my post from 2018, those assholes took no accountability, even though my home was infested upon move-in. I reported their various infractions to the FL attorney general's office, did get a reduction in how much they charged me for move-out costs.