Bedbugs in Dining Chairs and Upholstered Seating: Wandsworth

People with bedbugs start to see them everywhere, and a bite noticed at the dinner table can make every chair in the flat look suspect. Most of the time the chairs are clear. This guide explains why, the situations where they are not, and how to check without taking your furniture apart.

Why Chairs Are Usually Clear

Bedbugs feed on people who stay still for hours, and the place people stay still for hours is bed. They hide as close to that as they can, in the mattress seams, the bed frame and the headboard. A dining chair used for half an hour at a time, on the other side of the room, is a poor place for them to live.

When They Do Get Into Seating

• Someone sleeps in it. An armchair where someone naps every afternoon, or a sofa used as a bed, becomes a bed as far as bedbugs are concerned.
• It sits beside the bed. In a studio or a small bedroom, a chair next to the bed with clothes thrown over it is within easy reach.
• It came with them. Second-hand and clearance furniture can arrive with bedbugs already in it; the Putney page covers ex-display and clearance sofas and beds.
• The problem has been left a long time. A heavy infestation spreads out from the bed to whatever is nearby.

How to Check a Chair

1. Turn the chair over onto a pale sheet in good light, and have a torch ready.
2. Look along the staple lines under the seat and at the edges of the fabric or hessian stretched across the bottom.
3. Check the piping, buttons and any seams on the seat pad and back.
4. Look into the joints where the legs, rails and back meet the frame.
5. On a cushion with a zip, open it and look along the inside of the seams.

You are looking for small dark spots, pale shed skins, tiny pale eggs, or the bugs themselves. If you catch one, keep it on clear tape. Our London guide to where bedbugs hide that gets missed covers other furniture worth checking.

Sofas, Benches and Built-in Seating

Sofas are more likely to have bedbugs than dining chairs, simply because people fall asleep on them. That is also why we ask people not to move onto the sofa when the bed is biting: it turns one piece of furniture into two. Keep sleeping in your own bed and let the treatment deal with it.

Built-in seating and window seats are checked the same way: along the edges, under any cushions, and into the gap where the seat meets the wall.

How Seating Is Treated

With heat treatment, chairs and sofas stay in the room and are heated with everything else, including the inside of the upholstery, which is one reason heat suits rooms full of soft furniture. With chemical treatment, a residual insecticide goes into the frame joints and seams where it is suitable; ask when you ring about any fabric you are worried about. The heat and chemical treatment pages for Wandsworth explain the visits.

Please do not carry an affected chair or sofa out to the street before treatment unless we advise it. Moving it through the home drops bedbugs along the way, and a piece of seating is nearly always worth treating rather than replacing.

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