A bed bug infestation is seriously bad news for you and your family members, and it can leave you all itching painful red bites for several days afterwards. While the first thing that you should do once you find bed bugs in your home is to contact a professional to remove them as quickly as possible, there are a few other things that you should do once the bugs have been exterminated in order to get your home and your life back to normal again.

Clean Smaller Items

Despite their name, bed bugs can take up residence in any soft surface, not just your mattress and linens. Once your home has been treated, you'll want to wash all of your clothes, couch cushions, carpets, dog beds, and any other items made out of soft materials that could provide shelter to bed bug eggs or corpses. Steam cleaning them will prove to be most effective, though for convenience you should use your washing machine to clean any items that will fit inside.

Clean the Mattress

While the best thing to do after a bed bug infestation is to replace the mattress entirely, since it will likely be stained from the bed bug population, this is not always financially viable. Instead, you can make use of a steam cleaner to cleanse the surface of your mattress (though be sure to not use too much moisture, as this can cause all sorts of other problems).

Additionally, for a no-water approach, you can make use of a dry brush to scrub the seams of your mattress to remove as much staining and as many bed bug corpses as possible, before using a vacuum cleaner over the surface of your mattress several times for a deeper clean. You may also want to place a waterproof cover over your mattress: this will trap any remaining bed bugs against the surface of the mattress, where they will die quickly and not reproduce, and reduce the likelihood of a future infestation.

Check Nooks and Crannies

Finally, you should also take the time to move through your home and check dark out of the way areas for any stragglers that a professional pest control specialist was not able to kill during their treatment or corpses that have not been vacuumed up already. General-purpose chemical cleaning materials will easily kill any remaining pests and sanitize these areas: doing so will also give you peace of mind that your home is as clean as possible. 

To truly take care of the bed bug problem, contact a local bed bug removal service.

Share