Bed bugs and Vinted etc

[Rainforests555]

have the bed bug headlines made you think twice about ordering clothes or anything fabric-based from websites or apps like Vinted and eBay ? I was looking at some baby items, but now I’m wondering if it’s not worth the risk !

Easily treated... If you have the money! After the treatments and throwing away some items that were stained from them, I didn't even have enough money to buy a new mattress, I had to wrap it in cling film and leave it thay way for years. I'm now so paranoid about bed bugs that when I got a new mattress, I wrapped that one in a couple layers of cling film too

I set bug bombs off in every room, left every door and draw open for 6 hours, came home hoovered an washed everything and they were gone. No need to replace anything. Admittedly this wasn’t in the UK where I found pesticides a lot stronger than the UK.

I do wash stuff before I sell it on Vinted of course! But I am also likely to wash it and then shove it in a bag/box for months before I get around to listing it, some stuff even sat around for 3 years in between DC and then for whatever reason the younger one didn't wear it. I didn't see the point in washing everything again just to list it when it was all already technically clean. I just washed stuff that had developed milk stains in storage.

I thought they liked to live in wood / bed frames

Rather than fabric

That's moths

It doesn’t work like that though, my parents’ are a great example, we can only presume that their infestation came in with a visitor who stayed en route home from somewhere in Europe (well before the current stories).

Their house is pristine/spotlessly clean. You’d never think that they could have bed bugs.

My teen brought one home from holiday. I was lucky that we caught it early; only a total of 4 bugs spotted, but I went for the nuclear option of a full house fumigation after meticulously cleaning, hoovering, steam treating and freezing everything. It hasn't been long enough yet to see whether they're gone; their eggs can lay dormant for a year and the only hope is that if there are any eggs left they hatch and get killed before they can lay new eggs.

Cost me £400 total and I was very lucky with that price.