Preparing for Victory, I Unwrap the Sofa

Sunday, 9 days after the initial discovery. I'm not very rested (up until 4 am "painting" the baseboards and crown moldings with DE), but I decide I'm unwrapping the sofa.  It'd been well over the 48 hour period needed for bed bugs to crawl through DE and die, and I was pretty confident I'd coated the couch so heavily that nothing would survive.

Unwrapping a sofa is much easier than wrapping it. A good pair of scissors is all you need.  I sliced length-wise and back to front along the center of the sofa. I hauled out the vacuum-cleaner and proceeded to vacuum every inch of the sofa. Not terribly easy when all you have is the crevice nozzle attachment.

That little opening? Less than an inch long and maybe 1/4 inch wide. Great for crevices. But my sofa is 9 feet long and pretty deep.

I expected to find a field of different sized carcasses on the floor.

Instead I found several adult bed bugs chillin' along the zippers of the sofa cushions. Note, when I'd coated the sofa with DE I did not individually coat each cushion. I just set them atop the coated sofa and wrapped the whole thing in one big package. At the time, I still wasn't fully cognizant of how cunning and capable of hiding the bugs are, and figured any bugs I hadn't noticeably killed the first day of home treatment must be hiding in the frame.

3 hours after I started unwrapping the sofa, I was resigned to wrapping it again. I knew the hardware store 6 blocks from me closed at 5:00, it was just after 4:00. I headed down for a new 10' x 25' sheet of thick plastic. When I got there, I learned the hardware store is closed on Sundays.

What. The? What kind of hardware store is closed on Sundays?

I was furious with myself for not going to the hardware store the day before as I'd planned before I spent the day isolating the bed, and for not being bright enough wait until after I'd procured the plastic to unwrap the couch.

I headed home, knowing I'd be a sitting duck for any bug that wanted to crawl out at me. They like to feed every 3 or 4 days. It had been 9.

When I stopped figuratively kicking myself, it occurred to me I could at least get large garbage bags and individually wrap each cushion, and perhaps use the bags to help Macgyver the cut plastic back together with a whole lot of duct tape. That necessitated a walk to Walgreen's, which is a good 10 - 12 blocks from my place in the opposite direction from the hardware store.

So I schlepped to Walgreen's, bought the bags, bought more duct tape, bought a face mask to wear over my mouth and nose while spreading the DE around.

Midway through the re-wrap, I ran out of duct tape and prayed the little corner market a couple of blocks away would have some - I didn't want the 20 block round trip walk to Walgreen's again because I was running out of energy.

I got the sofa wrapped well enough for overnight but knew it wouldn't hold and knew I had multiple hours of effort the next day to get it re-wrapped and wouldn't have the time or energy to do it after work, so planned to call out "sick" the next day to deal with it.