Ok so hopefully this doesn't take long to explain. We are in the homestretch of this nightmare and I hope it is finally coming to a close. Soooo.....back in February of 2015, we had to move for my boyfriends job. It's a rural area so we basically had to take what we could get. The house we rented was a nice house, but it had an odor about it that I attributed to the carpet. I hired someone to clean the carpets prior to us moving in and hoped that would take care of the smell. When we showed up with the uhaul the carpets looked like they hadn't been cleaned, the smell was still bad but we went ahead and moved in our stuff and I was going to contact the carpet guy again. First night in the house and everything seemed fine. We began cleaning and organizing. The next morning I had gotten up already and I went to our room to wake up my son and there was a bug on the foot of the bed. I didn't know what it was, so I took a pic of it and then I got a tissue and was going to grab it off there and smash it. It basically exploded and got blood on our mattress that was only about 8 months old. As soon as I saw the blood I thought "could this be a bed bug?" So I started googling. I was devastated. I knew right then I wouldn't be able to live in this house. We slept (I didn't) on the couch the next night and I decided to call and book a hotel and leave all of our stuff because I was about to stroke out from anxiety. I contacted orkin to get advice on what to do. We dried all of our clothes that we were going to take with us and changed outside the back door and left. We had an inspector come out and confirm that the house was infested with bed bugs. We lived in a hotel for 23 days until we found a new house. I have major OCD so I literally stood outside the front door of the bug house while my boyfriend handed me EVERY SINGLE item we moved in there and I cleaned everything. Everything fabric, I bagged (sometimes double bagged) in industrial trash bags and sealed. We bought the mattress encasements from orkin for our mattresses and we moved our couch, recliners, dressers, etc into a storage unit. We had the storage unit treated by orkin and our stuff. Twice. I know everyone won't agree with our methods but I absolutely could not risk taking these things with us. We loved our couch because we had just bought it recently and it's super comfortable. We lost around $5000 in one month because of this. Rent, deposit, electric, gas, hotel, rent for new place, food, new pillows, luggage. Our animals also got ate up with fleas so that was a couple hundred dollars as well. I lost the first small claims suit because the judge wanted a bed bug expert to educate him on the nature of the bugs (insert eye roll). So I appealed and ended up winning the appeal. Landlord decided she was going to pay me $50 a month (another eyeroll) so I garnished her bank account successfully. ANYWAYS, lol, it is now December 2016 and we finally moved our couch out of storage. We brought it into the house yesterday and I am having the worst anxiety over it. I found an exoskeleton when I was cleaning it and it freaked me out. I do want to mention that when we left the house that second night we never saw another bed bug, but I did see a dead on through our mattress cover right after we put it on so I'm glad we bought them. So it's been roughly 22 months since we stored the couch and had it treated twice. Some people may think I'm nuts to think there is anything to worry about. I can't help it. I suffered ptsd from this nightmare. I'm looking at every little flake of anything I see near or on the couch. Please someone reassure me that we have nothing to worry about. Also, we stored the stuff in a facility that is basically empty and no one near us, so I'm not worried about having gotten any from a nearby unit. And yes I'm aware that I probably paid as much as what I did for the couch to store it but I didn't want to let it go and I didn't want to put a cover on it because chances are I never would have removed it because of my anxiety. Any responses would be GREATLY appreciated!!
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