Bed bugs made us burn our furniture. In the end we still paid several hundred dollars for an exterminator cause they were that persistent.

Nearly every NYC apartment has pest issues. Landlords don’t actually give a fuck about resolving them, so I end up doing most of it. I’ve had roaches, mice, and all colors of mold.

Mice are the most annoying. Unfortunately glue traps are the only traps that work on them, but I would check them often and Ol’ Yeller any stuck mice I found with a crossbow. Instant lights out.

Where I live, there are American cockroaches. The good thing is that they don’t nest in homes, so their presence isn’t a commentary on your cleanliness. But they do wander into homes looking for food. And guys, they’re huge! Like you can hear them crawling.

I asked the pest control guy if there was a way to be finally rid of them and he said “move”.

I’ve had fruit flies before that must have come in on some produce, have to be on it to clear them, leave out any fruit/veg scraps and they come out (out being tossed in the trash/green bin too, anything open air). Drop of dish soap, water and vinegar in a high walled glass or jar is the way to do it, I used balsamic but malt or wine vinegar works too, just leave that out and it’ll do its job.

My current place we jokingly call the spider house, have a bunch of house spiders around (cats love them) and a few orb-weavers, garden and wolf spiders outside, pretty much anything native isn’t a threat to humans or cats, they do a great job of taking out any pests, rarely see flies inside these days. Spiders and centipedes I’ll leave alone, they’re beneficial to have around.

A few years ago we had a problem with teenage girls in the bathroom. Basically made it unusable for most of the day.

Glad to say they have now graduated college and the problem worked itself out.

Thankfully, only ants have been the worst we’ve had so far. Liquid ant baits take care of them in the house, while mound killer granules take care of the ones outside. There’s the occasional tiny scorpion in the house every few weeks in the summer, while the bigger scorpions and spiders sometimes show up in the garage. They’re usually easy to kill because my garage is relatively empty, so it’s easy to chase them around.

Old house. Mice are seasonal for us. We get one or two in the fall when they start looking for shelter for the winter, and again in the spring when they start exploring/multiplying. We used traps, Now that we have cats though, they mostly stay away or get caught.

We got Carpenter ants around the front entrance to the house one year, had to call an exterminator to spray the nest, which was outside under the front porch. Those little fuckers stuck around for weeks afterwards, which is apparently how long the poison takes to eradicate them all.

We pretty much always have mice in the attic, despite the exterminator calls and the snap-traps we set. Occasionally we catch one in the garage. They never manage to infiltrate the rest of the house because we have 5 cats and each one lives for the moment a mouse is spotted so that they can catch it and play with its barely-breathing corpse before they try to eat it. We don’t use rodent poison for that reason, just in case the cats get one.

1. rats or mice (not sure which one is correct in english) - my father sealed the pipe they were coming from. not that serious (there weren’t many rats) but it was pretty scary.

2. termites - replaced the old wooden door with another door. my house isn’t made of wood so it wasn’t very serious, but it was annoying.

3. wasps - thousands of them all bunched up in one spot in the garage, dealt with using smoke and fire. they hadn’t made a nest yet as they’d appeared suddenly.

three times:

1. rats - tore out two walls and a ceiling looking for their ingress. Found the hole, sealed it, took advantage of the situation to insulate and refinish the room, no problems since.

2. mice - set traps while improving home infra. Raised shelves, removed things acting at mouse ladders, started keeping grains in sealed, hard-sided containers. Went around the outside of the house removing clutter and harboring plants, planted herbs that repel rodents instead. Sprayed essential oils for several weeks as a deterrent, and placed a few permanent traps as check for effectiveness. No mice in the years since.

3. water roaches - boiled or threw out the items they seemed attracted to, used chemical scent obliterators on any adjacent surfaces. Placed pet-safe gel poison behind all the furniture in the kitchen. No problems since.

The joys of a fixer-upper home.

The ongoing pests are flies and birds. This summer I’ll be exposing and reinsulating the vent area above the finished attic and replacing the damaged louvers that the birds have nested in. The flies seem to crawl straight through the window sashes, though, no idea how to solve that one.

Childhood spring one year, conditions were perfect for millipedes. The basement floor was covered in them. I mean covered with the floor barely visible.

They weren’t damaging or dangerous, just disgusting. My dad put on his outdoor shoes and just walked around in tiny steps smashing them. He walked for hours. Then scraped them up with a plastic snow shovel and threw them outdoors for the birds to go wild. Then walked some more.

No other spring since has resulted in those sorts of numbers. It was interesting to see my dad’s reaction: the disgust and fascination and satisfaction. God help him if he ever discovers pimple popper videos and the like, we would lose him to the algorithm.

Yes, it was terrible. She was super invasive. She wouldn’t leave even after I broke up with her. We were both on the lease, so I couldn’t kick her out, so I just quit paying rent. We both got evicted.

Although extreme, that did finally work. Worst pest ever.

I had a pair of foxes raise a litter of kits under my garden shed. They were so cute and fun to watch!

Well they left me with fleas. I had to seal off the foundation of the shed, cut holes in the floor, and drop some nasty pesticides (phosgene) under, and seal it back up.

Mice isnan ongoing issue. We have tube traps they get stuck in, they get drowned in a bucket of water and then thrown out for the birds to eat. Tube traps are very effective if poison isn’t an option.

The only thing I ever had were food moths, after leaving an open container of flour out and putting it away after a day. It was pretty disgusting having their larvae crawling around, but luckily there are parasitic wasps you can order that kill their eggs (they look like tiny specks of dust, not normal wasps).