I had bed bugs twice in six months – this is what I learned

It should be news to no-one that bed bugs are nasty little pests: they’re persistent, hardy and will chew their way across your body until red, swollen, itchy bites are zigzagging up your arms and legs.

This was my experience anyway. Across six months in 2023 and 2024, the South London flat that I share with two friends was afflicted by bed bugs twice – coinciding nicely with the Paris bed-bug scare that swept the media and was helpfully fuelled by TikTok.

Here’s what we did to try and get rid of them, and here’s what eventually worked.

Diatomaceous earth

Our first port of call was diatomaceous earth. This is a fine powder made up of naturally occurring “siliceous sedimentary rock” containing the fossilised remains of tiny hard-shelled microalgae. Simple enough.

After reading some advice on the r/London subreddit, we learned that this stuff can kill bed bugs by dehydrating them. It’s pretty easy to come by on Amazon, and after a trip to a local DIY shop for a dust mask and a sieve, I spread it all over my room; onto the mattress and around the skirting boards, bed frame and other conspicuous areas. You can make a liquid solution by mixing the earth with water, which I then sprayed on other fabrics such as my office chair upholstery and curtains.

It’s important to bear in mind that the earth won’t kill any unhatched bed-bug eggs. This means you should leave the room in this dusty state for two weeks before cleaning the mess up and, if you want to be doubly sure, you can repeat the process. I’d read somewhere that bass-heavy music makes these eggs hatch earlier, so I gave this a go too (apologies again to my upstairs neighbours).

After a few weeks, I was still finding the little blighters on my bed, and more bites on my arms.

At-home bed bug treatment kits

In addition to the diatomaceous earth, I also acquired an at-home bed-bug treatment kit. This came with some chemical spray bottles, some sticky traps and a couple of bed-bug smoke bombs. To prepare the smoke bombs, I shut all the windows and set it on a plate in the middle of the room before lighting it and getting out of there as quickly as possible.

In theory, this fumigates the room and kills the bugs in there. I found I needed to tape up the spaces around my door to stop the smoke seeping out and setting off the alarm in the hallway (which I took as a rather promising sign that the stuff was doing its thing). And it’s no wonder: for the next day or so, the room did smell like it had been on fire.

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Calling in the pros

With hindsight, this really should have been our first solution. After trying and failing to solve the issue myself, we paid an exterminator to do the job for £50 per room (we decided at our own risk to have just one bedroom treated). The room was sprayed with a water-based solution and I was advised to wash all my clothes and reseal the skirting boards. One hefty dry cleaning bill and an amateur caulking job later and the problem was finally solved.

But as the title of this article implies, that wasn’t the end of it. About four months later, bed bugs appeared in one of the other bedrooms. We still don’t know whether these were from the same brood or whether – in a stroke of very bad luck – they were brought in from outside. I live in a large block of flats and know that neighbours have had bed-bug issues before. In any case, this time round our first instinct was to call in the exterminator again.

Depending on where you live, it’s worth checking whether your local council offers a free pest-control service for your home. Our council does, but we discovered this too late.

Again, though, the bugs prevailed.

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The takeaway

I don’t want to discredit all DIY bed bug removal methods as ineffective. The truth is that they didn’t work for us. Maybe we were unlucky, or maybe we were doing something wrong, but we sank a fair bit of money into a series of ineffectual solutions and dragged the issue out far longer than necessary.

Touch wood, we are now bed bug free – although I still sometimes feel phantom crawling sensations on my skin at night and I am occasionally plagued by insect-related nightmares.

So, with all this said, my advice to those afflicted by bed bugs is: don’t be a hero, call an expert. And good luck.