This is going to be long but if you are as traumatized as I was by the discovery that you are housing bed bugs, then you'll probably appreciate it. Within three weeks of living in our new (1.5 year old) condo rental, I discovered a bed bug casually perched on a baseboard. I immediately killed and saved it. Within the following weeks my partner and I were finding and killing 5-10 baby bedbugs per day in different rooms of the unit -- living room, den, bathroom, and finally, bedroom. From what my research told me, this was highly unusual. Our bed was clean and we were not getting bites, which is fortunate because we have an 8 month old baby. We went through a painful couple of weeks -- our landlords blamed us, accused us of finding a dead bug and planting it, you name the harassment and we were subject to it. The condo property management uses a big-name company and when I found out, I was devastated. The big-name company generally require multiple treatments to "control" the problem -- since we have a baby, this would mean extensive unit preparation and 24-48 hours in a hotel for our family every two weeks until the problem was solved, which could potentially take months -- we were facing an incredibly expensive, disruptive and traumatic experience. The PCO from the big-name who came to inspect our unit only heightened my anxiety about working with his company. He delayed our treatment process by a week -- he took my number and said he would call me to schedule an appointment and never did. I found out that this is apparently against their policy. We received several documents on treatment preparations (that I had to forcibly track down from building management) but with conflicting directions -- one page said to bag everything, another said not to. One said to steam our furniture in advance, another said that the PCO would do this. No one would get back to us with clear instructions and finally when one representative (and one sheet of paper) confirmed that we would need to thoroughly vaccuum baseboards daily after the treatment (not possible without daily childcare) we cut our ties with the big-name and decided to call Muhammad with Pest Solution Services. From the moment I called Muhammad, I truly felt that we had found a solution and a solution is genuinely what Muhammad offers, not "pest control" but "pest solutions". When I asked Muhammad about the daily baseboard vacuuming, he chuckled and said "why would you need to do that? when I do my job, the bugs are gone. there is nothing left to vacuum." He explained that our case was particularly challenging since the bugs were in all of the rooms and not just in the bedroom and his fees for this kind of work were higher than normal. His price was higher than the big-names in the short-term but not in the long-term if you count the outrageous expenses of multiple treatments we could have faced from the other company -- in that case, Muhammad's fees are low. Muhammad sent us clear instructions on unit preparation and explained his experience and use of minimal chemicals around children. All of this was great news to us. We finally felt calm, like a solution was truly in our future. Our landlords, even after explaining the cost breakdown, were taken by the big-name of the big-name company. We finally offered to pay for the treatment ourselves as long as we could go with Muhammad. They could not say no to that. As soon as Muhammad arrived, it felt as though the nightmare was over. We felt taken care of. He did a thorough inspection, over-turning ever single piece of furniture -- he even removed the door-stops to check inside of them. He could not find evidence of bugs in our furniture or in any of the usual places. He said that never in his life had he seen something like this, but with that being the case, Muhammad's expertise was enough for him to eradicate our problem. He steamed and vacuumed our carpeted bedroom (a breeding ground for bugs), he steamed our mattress and bed furniture. I believe he used a pheromone to draw the bugs out from under the baseboard. He then sprayed all of the baseboard, the closets, every single crack and crevice. He could not find any living bugs at this point (he would have killed whatever was in the carpet) but he did find the molted skins of the bugs in the baseboards outside of the bedroom, on the ceiling of the bedroom closet and inside our heating-tank encasement in the living room. He used a residual dust in all of these areas and more -- behind the electronic socket covers, switchplates, our bedframe, in the area near the heating tank. I even found some dust on a corner between a utility cupboard and the ceiling. After the treatment, we stopped seeing the bugs but were concerned about some marks. Mohammad returned for a prompt follow-up when my neurosis got the best of me. I believe I was scratching old bites, but we inspected the unit again and had him install bed bug moats for our bed and our baby's crib as well as the latest technology in bed bug monitors that use C02 and two kinds of pheremones to attract the bedbugs -- these detectors have a better detection rate than expensive dogs. We were also able to purchase mattress encasements (even for a crib) through Muhammad. Other than a recommendation to use double-sided tape on the back of the monitors (they are as sticky as advertised, it turns out) we are completely satisfied. Muhammad went over-the-top to help give us a solution and then peace of mind after. He understands the trauma of bedbugs and was happy to indulge my obsession with them in detailed conversation about their breeding habits and neurological function. Ultimately, with his beyond-thorough inspection, he was able to give us his professional interpretation of what had happened in our unit -- it was most likely the previous tenant who unknowingly had the bugs and when she moved out (this could have been by moving the bed frame or mattress out the door while moving out) their nest was disturbed and they scattered, then bred -- as bed bugs apparently do. Muhammad is the best there is.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $800.00
