No, thank God, but I did have a possum trying to live under my bed and a pair of renegade raccoons who broke in every month or so and a flotilla of mice I called The Dumbo Collective (big ears) and a waddling skunk even a rat who sat up and begged for food. Living in a garden apartment is exciting.

Thankfully I've never had a problem with bedbugs...they sound very nasty though. I did have a cockroach problem for about 6 months because my neighbor who lived below me had a serious problem with cleanliness. His place was so badly infested with roaches, they began to trickle up to my place and to the apartment below him. Once I actually saw a giant roach walk under my door and into my apartment! Me and my neighbors complained to the landlord on several occasions. They finally took action after 6 months of dealing with this problem and he moved out of the building...and the roaches appeared to go with him.

Had them. Worst thing ever! ever! ever! Cost me hundreds if not thousands of dollars. My roommate somehow brought them into our dorm. Hell on earth.

Yes, in London where there is a serious problem. We (with our flatmates) spent thousands of pounds on sprayings but nothing worked. My flatmate, a neuroscientiest, then did some research and we discovered that vaseline on all vertical surfaces touching the ground, boric acid on the floors and removing and freezing everything in infested spaces (books clothes, everything!) is really the only thing that works. It took a lot of freezing. It worked.

In our last home we didn't have access to the attic during inspection. After buying the place we gutted the bathroom and got up there to find a bat roost – well over 100 bats! After we got rid of them, we found out that bats carry a parasite called "bat bugs". They look identical to bed bugs and are in the same family. When the bats left, they came down looking for blood! They are a disgusting nuisance that are easily removed in a single dwelling, but I couldn't imagine how hard it would be to rid them from a multiplex.

great…now i'm itchy :(

My friend had them - actually, everyone in her apartment did. They were living behind her upholstered headboard (dark and warm!).

I'm itchy just thinking about it!

"...their bits are very annoying and itchy..."

Something tells me that their bites are more annoying than their bits...

we had them. i think they hitchhiked down with a guest from nyc. oddly, our first clue was *not* finding bites on ourselves. we got home late one night, turned on the lights in the bedroom, and found them crawling around on my husband's pillowcase (and then upon inspection all over the bed). we had our place exterminated, got the bed-bug proof mattress covers, washed all of our clothing in HOT water (shrinking half of it in the process), etc. our w/d had just broken, so we spent a few weekends at the laundromat, washing and bagging everything we owned. ugh! thankfully haven't seen the bed bugs since. knock on wood! fingers crossed! it was *miserable* at the time, and i'm still pretty paranoid that one day i'm going to look at my bed and see them again...and have to go through the whole process again.

I had bites and a few bugs in one of my apartments during university years. Google (and mom, god bless her) helped me identify the source of those strangely uniform bites. That night I washed, vacuumed, and sprayed everything with rubbing alcohol and lavender oil after washing everything I could in scalding water. A few days of that, and the situation was controlled. I still worry that the bedbugs might be hiding on an item of clothing from years ago, but my sister now has that mattress (seemingly bug-free after a long stay in storage). It boggles my mind how huge infestations can happen. I'm not ocd, but I sweep the edges of my rooms and my mattress a couple times a year at least to keep a close eye on any future bedbug problems.

I've never had them (fingers crossed, knocking on wood...) but a friend brought them home from a Mexican resort. She managed to get rid of them by repeatedly bug bombing, spraying and hot-water washing.

Yuck. I am also itchy now.

btw, if any other dc people have bed bugs and want an exterminator, we used american pest control and found them to be knowledgeable, easy to deal with, and we haven't seen the bed bugs since: http://www.pestcentral.com/bedbugs/bedbug-elimination-guarantee.html

Yep... Not fun. My bf's friend brought them back from a trip where he stayed in a hostel. We all thought he was crazy at first (no bites on anyone else and he had a rep for overreacting about bugs) and my boyfriend has a thing against pesticides, so we didn't spray when his roommate did (and threw out most of his furniture too).

Within 2 weeks I was getting insane amounts of bites which grew in number constantly (started with 1 or 2 that I thought were hives, went up to 20 in one night around my waist). We tried natural alcohol tagetes oil tea tree oil but it only worked for a little.

Eventually, despite our hate of chemicals, we got out industrial strength bug killers and diatomaceous earth (I think it was directly from a factory...) and covered everything wood in it. Double sided tape to cover the vents and plastic covers for the mattresses. All laundry was removed in plastic bags and at least $50 was spent in drying/washing at the laundromat.

We only found bugs in the bed frame (knotty pine futon frame) but there were lots! We took apart the entire frame, wrapped it in plastic bags and tarps, and left it on the roof from mid December to a few weeks ago. Ottawa gets a lot of -30 weather, so they froze. We haven't had any problems since, but leave mattress covers on for a year!!!

and remember NOT EVERYONE REACTS!!! My bf only noticed one or two bites that were on his fingers that only flared up when he stuck his hands in tomatoes (a mild allergen for him) while I was covered head-to-toe with huge red welts exceeding my usual mosquito or deerfly reactions.

When I lived in Denver I had an apartment with bed bugs. They sent the exterminator out every couple of months for TWO YEARS before they were finally gone!

Cost me tons of money as I had to replace all of my furniture and also cost me tons of time as I had to clear out and chemically steam clean every few months.

Helpful hint: If you have bed bugs, put double stick tape around the legs of all furniture to keep them from climbing up and burrowing in.

worst pest experience ever!!! it was very stressful in general.

my roommate at the time & i discovered we had them... who knows how, they could have travelled with a guest, with us from a hotel or may have been in the building before we got there

she was getting bit for a while but couldn't figure it out. then one night i woke up and a bug was crawling across my pillow. UGH

the next day i still hadn't realized it could be bed bug so i flipped my mattress looking for spiders or something. UGH

they had a small home in the crevices of the mattress. i had only heard of a friend in new york with the same issue a few years previous... did some research online and it was pretty clear that was the issue. i started getting big welts in groupings of 3 or more.

i had a hard time sleeping after that, moved to the couch and they followed me there! in chicago it is regulated as a public health thing so the landlord had to get an exterminator. many exterminators don't know much about them so it can often take many visits to get them under control.

we both were moving, so i am not sure how it got taken care of building-wide. i don't know how it could have been since they can live for 18 months without feed and go in crevices. when my roommate found them in the hole in the wall that a nail was in i immediatly freaked out and decided to not take any furniture to the new apt. with me.

so, the remaining stuff had to be either treated or cleaned. you can't clean books and such, so i bagged all of it. no one could guarantee me they weren't hiding in any of those crevices. so everything that was dear to me & that i couldn't completely inspect, treat or clean was bagged for two years. i just didn't want to have to deal with all of that again so i erred on the side of caution.

clothes had to be washed in hot and dried. i lost the majority of my wardrobe due to shrinkage.

it was kind of stressful, i had to put a lot of money into new furniture (i didn't have a lot to begin with, but its not cheap either way), new clothes, treating stuff and most of the things that made my home feel like a home were gone, in bags.

all that and i still couldn't sleep peacefully for a long time!

i personally don't ever want to live in a large apartment building again, don't take luggage into hotels or sometimes even friends houses when travelling (if i do i store them away from beds and off the floor) and if i get second hand furniture i scrub it and inspect it.

sounds neurotic but it is really something you don't want to experience twice!

If you're traveling to a major city like New York or London, or to any hot travelers destination, it's a good idea to leave your bags, clothes and shoes outside for a couple nights when you get back if its below zero or REALLY hot, or drop them in the deep freeze, if you have one. Bedbugs can't survive in extreme freezing or extreme heat and direct sunlight.We had two scares in my apartment building (which I had to ask about, they NEVER warned us that our neighbours were infested but I saw the exterminators. I guess the building manager didn't want to cause a panic) and so we moved.

It was too much for me to handle! Even though we didn't get them, the stress, the constant fear-google-ing, it was overwhelming. I slept with no covers in the center of the bed with the legs covered in vaseline for a week, the mattress wrapped in double sided tape, waking up every ten seconds imagining ghost bugs all over me- aggghhhhh.

It was reported that they were a real problem in NYC just a few years ago, and that everybody, rich and poor, had them. I know that my daughter had them in her apartment. She was very casual about it ... I had lived in NYC for 22 years without a bed bug problem, but plenty of roach and rat problems.

My sister went to hostel in Chicago a year ago. She was there for medical treatment but stayed inthe hostel to save money. It turned out the hostel had them. Freak out! She was out of there in seconds flat.

This post makes me SO itchy. Ugh.

At the start of a day volunteering at a shelter, the head of the program started the morning with a warning about bedbugs. She talked about the time she'd gotten them from cleaning one of the rooms in the facility, which is what I was there to do. For the rest of the day most of us had the panic of imagined itches. When I got home, her story was still running through my mind. I stripped down in the hallway of my apartment building, ran inside, came back to the hall with a garbage bag, sealed my clothes inside, and took a hot, hot shower. The clothes stayed in the bag until they were put in the laundry too. I'm not saying this was the cure-all, but it helped psychologically AND they never found their way into my home (or the rest of the apartment building as far as I know!).

Bed bugs are just beginning to gain awareness in the Northwest. However, they are here! Bed bugs spread to my unit from my next door neighbor. It took eight months of hyper-diligence to get rid of them with chemical treatment. I would opt for thermal if it happens again, however that wasn't available in Portland, OR last year. It was the most difficult event of my life, and the residual stress is finally "almost" gone. As a result an advisory task force is being formed to educate and look at policy. www.bedbugsnorthwest.com