How Should You Prepare a Bedroom for Professional Bed Bug Treatment?

Do Not Move Anything Out of the Room

This is the most important instruction and the one that goes against every instinct. Moving furniture, bedding, clothing or belongings to another room takes bed bugs with them and creates a second infested room out of a single-room job.

The same goes for bagging things up "to keep them safe" and putting them on a landing or in a spare bedroom. Keep everything in the affected room until it has been treated.

Do Not Move Yourself Either

Everyone stays in their own bed until the treatment is done. Moving to a spare room or a sofa is the commonest way a one-room job becomes a two-room job, and £120 is added to the bill for the sake of a few uncomfortable nights.

It is a genuinely unpleasant piece of advice to give and it is the right one.

What to Actually Do

Strip the bed and wash all bedding on the hottest wash the fabric allows, then tumble dry hot. Carry it to the machine in a sealed bag rather than through the house in your arms. Do the same with clothing from the affected room where the fabric allows.

Then clear the floor and create access: move furniture a foot or so away from the walls if you can, take everything out from under the bed, and clear the tops of bedside tables and chests. The technician needs to reach the skirting, the frame, the back of the headboard and behind the furniture.

Then Vacuum, Carefully

Slowly, with the crevice tool, along the skirting, the carpet edges, the bed frame joints and the seams of the mattress. It removes a proportion of the live population and, more usefully, the eggs.

Empty the cylinder or remove the bag immediately, seal it in a plastic bag, and put it in the outside bin. Do not leave a full cylinder indoors and do not carry it through the house unsealed.

What Not to Use Beforehand

No shop-bought sprays, foggers or bug bombs. They scatter the population out of the harbourage and deeper into the room, they do not reach eggs, and they make a professional treatment slower and less certain.

No steam cleaning or shampooing of the carpets immediately beforehand. And nothing thrown away yet — the mattress is treated in place, and it very rarely needs replacing. Treatment is £220 for the first room and £120 for each additional room, and any room somebody sleeps in should be looked at while we are there.