How Can You Avoid Spreading Bed Bugs While Moving Furniture?

Deal With It Before the Move, Not After

If you know or suspect there are bed bugs and a move is coming, treating beforehand is dramatically cheaper than the alternative — which is treating a second property that you have just carried the problem into, while the first one is somebody else's problem and possibly your dispute.

It is also easier. A property being packed up is a property being emptied, and an empty room with every edge reachable is the best conditions a treatment ever gets.

If the Move Cannot Wait

1. Do not take the bed. If any item is going to carry it, this is the one. Treat it, or replace it after the move rather than before
2. Everything washable goes hot before it is packed — hot wash, full hot tumble dry, then sealed in bags that are not opened until the new property is ready
3. Pack in new, sealed boxes, not in second-hand ones and not in open crates
4. Inspect the furniture that is coming, item by item, outside if you can — undersides, joints, dust covers
5. Wrap anything suspect before it goes on a van, and decide whether it is coming at all
6. Unload into one room at the new property rather than distributing everything, so that if something has travelled it is contained

Removal Firms and Storage

Two practical points, and both are awkward conversations that are much less awkward than the alternative.

• Tell the removal firm. Their van carries other people's belongings the same week. Most have a policy; none of them want to find out afterwards
• Do not put anything into shared storage. A storage unit is a cool, dark, undisturbed space full of other people's furniture, and bed bugs survive months without a host — longer in the cold
• If items must be stored, they should be treated or inspected first, and sealed

Arriving at a Property Somebody Else Has Left

Worth ten minutes before your furniture goes in, and almost nobody does it.

1. Check the bedrooms first — skirting lines, carpet edges, sockets on the walls where beds stood
2. Look for the marks a bed leaves on a carpet and check the perimeter there
3. Check any furniture left behind, particularly anything upholstered
4. Look in the loft hatch surround and any built-in wardrobes
5. If you find anything, deal with it before you move in rather than after

An empty property is not a cleared one. A void period between occupants does not resolve an infestation, and a room that has stood empty over a winter is if anything a room where they have survived comfortably.

Cookham: Which Items Are Genuinely Worth Replacing

A move is the one time replacing something makes economic sense, because you were going to handle it anyway and because the new property is clean.

• Worth replacing at a move: a bed or mattress already at the end of its life, a worn-out sofa, an infested divan base with sealed voids
• Not worth replacing: a sound mattress, a metal or solid wooden frame, anything that can be treated and encased
• Worth treating first either way: everything else, so that what arrives is clean rather than hopeful