The Battle Begins - pt. 2

Now that I had an action plan, I could get to work.

I didn't find any more harborages at first and so started with the steamer. I quickly established a pattern. With each seat cushion and back pillow I first steamed the zippers, then the seams, then the piping. I started with one corner and worked clockwise, then flipped each cushion or pillow over and repeated the process. After the seams and piping, I would steam all sides of the pillows. After that, I repeated the same process on a larger scale with the whole sofa.

There were a couple of adult bugs clinging to the corners of the seat cushions, so I got to see the steam in effect. Blasting the bugs for a few seconds resulted in them puffing up, then collapsing dead. I think I liked the melting and bleeding out from contact with alcohol a little more: I'll confess to some vengeful blood lust.

When I was satisfied with the steam (2 hours later) I swept around and under the couch, along the baseboards in the room and then the room in its entirety.

Procuring the Diatomaceous Earth (DE) proved more difficult than I'd imagined, in part because I've chosen a life of public transit over a life of car ownership. I rode the bus to the Home Depot in Emeryville that isn't , asked the greeter where I could find "things for killing bugs and stuff" and headed to the proper isle. They had all sorts of sprays and powders for various insects, but their bed bug supply was limited to a Raid aerosol spray (ie: pesticide). I searched the rest of the aisle, moving from bug killers to rodent killers to plant nurturing growth chemicals. Colder ... colder.

I whipped out my trusty Droid MyTouch and looked up DE again. On the Home Depot website it is listed in the garden section. A lead! This time, I walked up to the customer service rep in the garden department and showed him the bag of DE on my phone, then asked if he knew where I could find it in the store.

At first he said he didn't know what it was, but a few sentences later said people have come in asking for it and they don't carry it in their store. Silly me for thinking they'd have it in stock. No, really - silly me. I should have called ahead

I debated picking up the rest of the stuff I needed there but decided instead to go outside and call the Ace Hardware store that is 6 blocks from my house and ask if they have DE. I knew they'd have painters plastic and duct tape. I called and asked if they have it - they did, and I asked them when they close. It was a little after 4:00 and they closed at 5:00. Not fully trusting my memory that DE is actually safe for pets, I asked the guy. He said it wasn't. I told him that I'd Googled and read that the stuff is for use in organic gardening and is sometimes given to people and pets to treat intestinal worms. He said no, it contains silica and that is bad for humans and animals.

I thanked him and hung up and being frazzled, struggled for a few minutes with whether he didn't know what he was talking about or I'd totally misremembered what I'd read. I tried to Google again but the browser was taking forever on my phone. At that point, I started to break down. I felt tears welling up and was about to lose it there in the Home Depot parking lot, but managed to buck up quickly after dropping a couple of tears. I decided to trust my memory and go to the hardware store and get the DE anyway, as long as I could get there before they closed. (It turns out the sales guy was right in part: For an update and warning on use of DE, see here).

I made it, and the salesperson who helped me there didn't share his co-worker's opinion that DE was unsafe in the presences of humans and animals. He was, however, completely unaware that DE was effective for use with bed bugs, and asked me to report my experience back because they've had a lot of people coming into the store lately looking for bed bug treatment and killing products.

3 out of 3 encounters with customer service people who knew less than I'd learned in a couple of hours of research and had wrong or  unhelpful information (I'm  not counting the Home Depot greeter). I shared my encounters with each of them to illustrate the lack of information out there, because disseminating accurate information part of the reason for this blog.

When I got home, wrapping the sofa turned out to be far more of a Herculean undertaking than I'd prepared for.  First, there are the logistics of unwrapping a 10 ft. X 25 ft. sheet of plastic in a 14 ft. X 17 ft. room (that still has a sofa in it, and which is folded to accordion out on both sides). Then the maneuvering the sofa onto said sheet of plastic. I haven't mentioned it, but I'm 5'3. Lifting a sofa that is 9 feet long and about 4 feet deep is not a picnic. And that wasn't even the hard part. The hard part was the taping. If you ever find yourself wrapping a sofa in plastic, make sure you have another body with another set of hands present - they hold while you tape.  It took me 3 hours to fully tape plastic.

Before wrapping, I thoroughly dusted the sofa with Diatomaceous earth. Every crevice was filled, every inch of piping coated, every seem liberally powdered.  After wrapping, I hoped.