Do the Treated Rooms On One Day
The temptation in a big house is to stage it — the main bedroom now, the others later if anything shows up. It is the wrong instinct and it is worth understanding why.
- A population that has reached two rooms will move back into a treated room from an untreated one
- Staging means the household moves around the house between visits, which is exactly the movement that spreads it
- Each stage needs its own preparation, its own exclusion period and its own disruption
- The rooms that are treated later have had extra weeks to develop
The inspection decides which rooms are treated; the treated rooms are then done together. That is not the same as treating everything - most rooms in most houses come back clear and stay out of the work.
Where Everybody Sleeps
The hardest practical question in a large household, and the one with the most counter-intuitive answer.
- Before the visit, everybody stays in their own bed. Moving children in together, or a parent to the spare room, spreads it into rooms that were clear
- On the day, the house is empty for the exclusion period you are given — that is a whole-house consideration in a way it is not in a flat
- Afterwards, back into the same beds. A treated bed with the household back in it is doing part of the work; an empty one is not
- Do not swap rooms afterwards to feel safer. It is the commonest cause of a second round
The Laundry Is the Real Constraint
Preparation for one bedroom is an evening. For four it is a logistical problem, because everything from every treated room needs a hot wash and a full hot tumble dry, and a domestic machine does perhaps five loads a day.
- Start two or three days before the visit, not the night before
- Bag each room's laundry in that room, sealed, and label the bags with the room
- Keep clean, dried laundry sealed in fresh bags until after the treatment — otherwise it goes back into the problem
- Do not carry loose armfuls through the landing between rooms
- The dryer matters more than the wash, so do not let a full load skip the full hot cycle to save time
- A launderette is a reasonable answer to the volume, with everything bagged both ways
Storage, Lofts and Garages
The particular hazard of a large house is that it has somewhere to put things, and putting things somewhere is how a contained problem gets distributed.
- Do not move furniture, bedding or boxes to the loft or garage to get them out of the way
- Do not move a mattress to another bedroom, however temporarily
- Do not put things in a spare room "for now"
- Under-bed storage comes out in treated rooms and stays out until you are told otherwise
- Anything already stored from a treated room needs raising and checking rather than leaving
Newbury: Coordinating the Day
- Confirm the exclusion period and plan the whole household around it, including anyone who works from home
- Arrange pets — where they go and for how long
- Finish the laundry before the day, not on it
- Clear the access the technician needs in every treated room: both sides of the bed, and space to move furniture
- Put the aftercare instructions somewhere everybody in the house will read them
- Agree that nobody vacuums or cleans the treated surfaces until the date you are given
In a larger house the aftercare instructions have to reach more than one person. One member of the household who cleans a treated skirting board because nobody told them undoes that part of the work - so put it in writing on the fridge, not in a conversation.
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