carpet beetles
I can't believe I don't have an insect icon! How strange.
My duties in the house I share include being tall and dealing with insects and other arthropods. This means I change lightbulbs, get things onto and off of high shelves (and store all my own food in the taller cabinets), remove insects from my roommate's room and the shared common spaces, and occasionally combine my talents by getting a spider off of the ceiling and transporting her outside. I'm quite happy performing these tasks most of the time. But I did not sign up for carpet beetles.
Carpet beetles are the evil, uglier siblings of ladybugs. They look kind of like small, dark ladybugs with light stripes on their backs. And instead of bringing cheer, they bring infestation and sorrow. (Okay, having now further researched ladybugs, I have to say that a ladybug infestation does not sound nice either.) Fortunately, they are better than bedbugs -- they do not bite people. But they do eat up natural fibers, hairs, and grains, and they nest in anything that is even partly organic (e.g., carpet, curtains). Many things that look moth-eaten have actually been attacked by carpet beetles.
It turns out that my roommate S's new house is full of carpet beetles. Particularly upstairs where the carpet is -- also where our bedrooms are -- though we've also found them in the kitchen and bathrooms. At first we just found a few, but then we realized the place was crawling. This is way worse for S, who can't stand bugs at all, than for me. But I was not pleased either, and as I realized how much of my stuff was at risk, and how hard they can be to get rid of, I got more alarmed.
Ironically, I had to throw away the lovely dragonfly curtains that my room came with, which I'd been delighted by (and which were one of the reasons that bug-phobic S had given me that bedroom instead of the other one), because they were badly eaten. And then I realized that I really didn't want my bed (a borrowed mattress from S plus my brand new sheets and pillows) to be on the floor. Or my clothes and books. Even though the beetles can and do climb all over, putting a bunch of my stuff right on the carpet just seemed to be asking for trouble. So this necessitated a trip to IKEA (actually two trips due to one mislabeled item) and multiple days assembling furniture (I'm very grateful to my boyfriend, B, who probably did not think of IKEA + furniture assembly as a very good date, but was awesome about it).
The bad news is that I spent a lot of money and got possibly not quite the furniture I would have under more relaxed c circumstances. The good news is, I now have a fully furnished place that feels a lot more like home. All this also makes me think about all my stuff in the storage pod, which is still waiting somewhere to be unpacked... some of that stuff I really miss, and some of it seems unnecessary right now. But I don't want to bring any of it into a carpet-beetle infested place, anyway.
Today I'm working from a cafe while the pest control people spray everything. We had to get all our stuff up off the floor, which meant repacking a few things that I'd unpacked. This treatment should help a lot. But we may need to get it repeated up to 2 more times to really get rid of the little buggers.
Aside from the carpet beetles, I love my place a lot! I'm still not sure how long I'm likely to live there, but it's pretty fantastic. I'll post pictures sometime soon.
My duties in the house I share include being tall and dealing with insects and other arthropods. This means I change lightbulbs, get things onto and off of high shelves (and store all my own food in the taller cabinets), remove insects from my roommate's room and the shared common spaces, and occasionally combine my talents by getting a spider off of the ceiling and transporting her outside. I'm quite happy performing these tasks most of the time. But I did not sign up for carpet beetles.
Carpet beetles are the evil, uglier siblings of ladybugs. They look kind of like small, dark ladybugs with light stripes on their backs. And instead of bringing cheer, they bring infestation and sorrow. (Okay, having now further researched ladybugs, I have to say that a ladybug infestation does not sound nice either.) Fortunately, they are better than bedbugs -- they do not bite people. But they do eat up natural fibers, hairs, and grains, and they nest in anything that is even partly organic (e.g., carpet, curtains). Many things that look moth-eaten have actually been attacked by carpet beetles.
It turns out that my roommate S's new house is full of carpet beetles. Particularly upstairs where the carpet is -- also where our bedrooms are -- though we've also found them in the kitchen and bathrooms. At first we just found a few, but then we realized the place was crawling. This is way worse for S, who can't stand bugs at all, than for me. But I was not pleased either, and as I realized how much of my stuff was at risk, and how hard they can be to get rid of, I got more alarmed.
Ironically, I had to throw away the lovely dragonfly curtains that my room came with, which I'd been delighted by (and which were one of the reasons that bug-phobic S had given me that bedroom instead of the other one), because they were badly eaten. And then I realized that I really didn't want my bed (a borrowed mattress from S plus my brand new sheets and pillows) to be on the floor. Or my clothes and books. Even though the beetles can and do climb all over, putting a bunch of my stuff right on the carpet just seemed to be asking for trouble. So this necessitated a trip to IKEA (actually two trips due to one mislabeled item) and multiple days assembling furniture (I'm very grateful to my boyfriend, B, who probably did not think of IKEA + furniture assembly as a very good date, but was awesome about it).
The bad news is that I spent a lot of money and got possibly not quite the furniture I would have under more relaxed c circumstances. The good news is, I now have a fully furnished place that feels a lot more like home. All this also makes me think about all my stuff in the storage pod, which is still waiting somewhere to be unpacked... some of that stuff I really miss, and some of it seems unnecessary right now. But I don't want to bring any of it into a carpet-beetle infested place, anyway.
Today I'm working from a cafe while the pest control people spray everything. We had to get all our stuff up off the floor, which meant repacking a few things that I'd unpacked. This treatment should help a lot. But we may need to get it repeated up to 2 more times to really get rid of the little buggers.
Aside from the carpet beetles, I love my place a lot! I'm still not sure how long I'm likely to live there, but it's pretty fantastic. I'll post pictures sometime soon.