How Do You Check Other Bedrooms for Bed Bugs?

Five Minutes a Room

The full search — frame apart, drawers out, headboard off — is twenty minutes or more and it is not what you want for four rooms you have no reason to suspect. This is the version that is worth doing on all of them.

1. Strip the bed to the bare mattress. Non-negotiable; a made bed covers the exact place to look
2. Piping at the head end, top face. Torch held nearly flat, working along it
3. Lift the mattress corner at the head end and look at the top of the base or the frame underneath
4. Down the gap behind the headboard, if there is one
5. The skirting directly behind the pillows, if the bed pulls out easily

That is it. Those five cover the places a new or moderate infestation would appear first, and between them they take about five minutes once you have done one.

What a Clear Result Actually Means

Worth being honest about, because "I checked and it was fine" carries more weight in a household than it should.

• It means: no established population in the most likely places on that bed
• It does not mean: the room is clear. The frame joints, the drawers, the bedside furniture and the perimeter have not been looked at
• It especially does not mean much if the room is unused, where a very small waiting population can leave almost nothing

Do It In the Right Order

Not the order the rooms come in. Work outward from the room you know about.

1. The room where evidence was found — already established
2. Any room somebody moved from or to in the last few months
3. Rooms sharing a wall with the affected one
4. Rooms where furniture from the affected room has been
5. Everything else with a bed in it
6. Any sofa or chair in genuine nightly use

Between Rooms, Change Nothing

The one risk in checking several rooms is that you become the vehicle. It is a small risk and it is worth managing anyway.

• Do the rooms you suspect last, not first
• Do not carry bedding, cushions or a torch bag from one room to the next — strip each bed into its own bag in its own room
• Wash your hands between rooms, and change if you have been kneeling on an infested bed
• Do not take anything out of one room to compare it in another

Newbury: In a Larger House, Count the Beds

The number that matters is not bedrooms — it is beds. A five-bedroom house with a sofa bed in the study and a bunk in the playroom has seven beds, and the two nobody thinks of are exactly the ones that go unchecked for years.

It takes half an hour to do seven beds properly at five minutes each. Set against the cost of finding out in the autumn that one of them has been going since the spring, that is a good half hour.