Bedbug Control Chingford

Leave the Room As It Is for Now

Close the door and stop anyone else using the room. Do not carry bags, boxes or bedding out across the landing, do not take the mattress downstairs, and do not put the bed out for collection. Every trip through the house with an affected item gives bedbugs a chance to drop off somewhere new.

Closing the door is a holding measure, not a fix. Bedbugs can go a long time without feeding, and once nobody is sleeping in that bed they start moving towards whoever is nearest. In most homes that means the next bedroom along, so it is worth getting the room treated soon rather than hoping it empties itself.

What to Do With Their Belongings

Whether you can dispose of a former lodger’s property, and how long you have to keep it, depends on your arrangement with them. Try to contact them in writing first. We are pest controllers, not legal advisers, so for anything beyond that take proper advice.

On the practical side, anything you are keeping for them should be dealt with inside the room:

1. Put soft items — clothes, bedding, towels — straight into strong bags and tie them shut before they leave the room.
2. Wash what you can on a hot cycle, or tumble-dry it hot, and re-bag it in fresh bags afterwards.
3. Leave boxes, suitcases and hard items in the room so they are treated with it.
4. Do not move any of it into a loft, shed or garage untreated. Bedbugs survive happily in storage.

Things that will not wash, such as a good coat or a suit, are covered in our guide on whether dry cleaning kills bedbugs.

Treating an Empty Lodger’s Room

A room nobody is living in is often a straightforward one to treat. With heat treatment, the whole room and whatever is left in it, boxes and bags included, is brought up to a temperature bedbugs cannot survive in a single visit, which also deals with the eggs. The belongings left behind are usually the reason heat is chosen here. Anything heat would damage has to come out first, and we will go through that with you.

If the room is nearly bare, chemical treatment can work well too and costs less. It needs two, sometimes three, visits about 10 to 14 days apart, and a follow-up is harder to arrange if you want the room let again quickly.

Before the Next Lodger Moves In

Check your own bed and any other bedroom in the house before you advertise the room. Look at the mattress seams, the corners of the bed frame and the skirting nearest the bed. If you are not sure what you are looking at, an inspection from £120 confirms it before you spend anything on treatment.

When you ring about a house in Chingford, tell us how long the room has been empty and whether anyone else in the house has had bites. The Waltham Forest page covers sharing a home with other people more broadly.

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