Are Bedbugs Worse in Older Houses in Havering?

What Age Does and Does Not Change

Bedbugs arrive in bags, furniture, clothes and bedding. The age of the brickwork has nothing to do with that, so a house built last year can pick them up the same week as one built a century ago. What age changes is what happens next: how many gaps there are within reach of the bed, and how easy those gaps are to find and treat.

Where an Older House Gives Them Room

Decades of settling, redecorating and drying out leave small openings in a room. None of them is a fault; they are just what an old room looks like up close.

• Floorboards with gaps between them, especially at the edges of a room where carpet gripper has lifted.
• Skirting boards that have pulled away from the wall, leaving a dark channel along the top or behind.
• Cracks in plaster, around door frames and at the corners of ceilings.
• Picture rails and dado rails with a small gap behind them.
• Old fitted cupboards, often built into alcoves, with joints that have opened over time.

Most bedbugs will still be in and around the bed. These extra places matter because they hold the stragglers, and it is the stragglers that make a problem seem to come back.

Why Newer Homes Get Them Too

A new build has tighter joints and smoother finishes, which makes bedbugs easier to spot and gives them fewer places away from the bed. It does not stop them arriving, and it does nothing about the bed itself. A divan base, a fabric headboard or an upholstered frame gives them all the cover they need in any house.

So if your home is new, do not assume it cannot be bedbugs. If it is old, do not assume the building is to blame. Both lead people to delay, and delay is what turns one bedroom into two.

What It Means for Finding Them

In an older room, the search goes wider. Along with the bed, look along the tops of skirtings nearest the bed, at the edges of carpet where it meets the wall, and into any crack in the plaster at bed height. Use a torch and look for dark spotting and pale shed skins. If you are unsure what you have, a Havering inspection from £120 confirms it.

What It Means for Treatment

With heat, the whole room is raised to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive, and the thermal camera is what makes it work in an old room. Gaps under boards, behind skirtings and in built-in cupboards can lag behind the rest, and the camera shows those cold spots so they are held until they come up. The heat treatment page covers the day in a family house.

With chemical, the residual goes into seams, frames and skirtings, and the technician works it into the gaps an older room offers. It still does not reliably kill eggs, so two visits, sometimes three, about 10 to 14 days apart, are part of the job. The chemical treatment page explains the course.

Neither route needs you to start pulling up boards or skirting before we arrive. Please do not; it disturbs them and spreads them.

Filling the Gaps Afterwards

Once the treatment is finished, sealing obvious gaps near the bed with a filler or decorator’s caulk is a reasonable piece of housekeeping. It leaves fewer places for any future arrival to settle. Do it after the course is complete, not during it: filling a gap that has just been treated with a residual can shut away the part that is doing the work. Ask when you ring if you are unsure about timing.

For the habits that stop bedbugs being carried into any house, old or new, the main Havering page goes through family routines one by one.

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