Bedbug Control Putney

Why Second-Hand and Ex-Display Pieces Are Worth Checking

A showroom bed may have had hundreds of people sit or lie on it. A clearance sofa may have come back from a customer's home, spent time in a warehouse, or travelled in a van with other returned furniture. None of that means it carries bedbugs, but each is a chance for one to have climbed into a seam, a staple line or the fabric under the base.

Upholstered pieces are the ones to worry about. A solid wooden table has far fewer places to hide than a divan with a fabric base or a sofa with deep cushions and a lining underneath.

Checking It on the Doorstep

If you can, look it over before it comes through the door, or at least before it reaches the room where it will live. A torch helps.

• Seams and piping. Run along every seam of the mattress, cushions and arms. You are looking for dark dots like ink marks, pale shed skins and tiny cream eggs.
• The underside. Turn a sofa or divan over if you can and look at the thin fabric stapled underneath, and along the staple lines themselves.
• Joints and corners. On a bed frame, check where the rails meet the legs and the headboard.
• Zips and labels. Folds of fabric around zips and sewn-in tags are favourite spots.

The London guide to where bedbugs hide that gets missed goes through the less obvious spots in more detail.

If You Find Something

Do not carry it through the house to get it out of the way. Leave it where it is, close to the door, and take photographs of what you found. Contact the seller in writing as soon as you find it and ask what they will do; whether they take it back is a matter between you and them.

If it has already been in the house for a while, the question is no longer just the item. Check the bed or sofa it sits nearest, and the floor around it. Our guide to upholstered seating explains how bedbugs move from a chair or sofa to a bed and back.

Treating the Item or the Room

A single piece caught early can often be dealt with where it stands. Once bedbugs have had time to move into the room, the room is what gets treated. Heat reaches deep into cushions and bases and kills eggs as well, usually in one visit; chemical treatment works on seams, frames and skirtings over two, sometimes three visits. Please do not throw a sofa or bed out before we have seen it: dragging it out through the flat spreads them, and most furniture can be treated and kept.

Treatments start from £220, and heat costs more than chemical. When you ring about a Putney home, tell us what the item is, when it arrived and which room it is in. The Wandsworth page has more on how the building type changes things.

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