cockroaches...wtf!

did anyone ever have those things?

i am so P>O>ED. i asked the frickin landlord if they had bug issues here and he said no. and to call him if i found anything ever was seen....
i think its a german roach.....i saved it in a container...ewww i know but i thought it would be best for the exterminator....

i would feel like a moron if that wasnt what it was.
i hit it with my shoe so i cant see the backhalf....

ughhh....

please please PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEAse
tell me i got stories about how someone got rid of these things without issue....

i know they are just a bug..but i dont want hep, the sh*ts and various other grossness that comes with these nasty beasts.

we have been here for three months and i never saw anything at all before this...maybe it just got brought in?

i dont know...im FREAKIN out.

tonight is going to suck...we are going over EVERYTHING with bleach and washing everything we own...and its only going to be 90degrees! wooooooooooooo

god i am so grossed out.

at least i saw it at night..i read that if you see em in the day its a bad infestation....


mmmmmmmmmmmmmm i am so unconfortable....!
i would rather be covered with 1000 live bees

oh god..they can live of fridge oil and dirty clothing?!
i thought they came for the catfood....no more all night snacks for kitty...im going to get bitten on the toes for that one.

im reading horrow stories here and no one want to admit to buggies.

even pm me man...

well this will do wonders for the diet...as i wont want to eat a damn crumb in the house....
god i cant wait till we get thsi taken care of tomorrow...

i HOPE to god it flew in the window....

and now..diet obsessed...i wonder how they dont get fat...and i creep myself out thinking *cause they just get BIGGER*

oh man i wnat to sleep in the park.


(sorry if this seems nutty..trying to keep my mind off it)

They don't bite, they don't really spread disease, they're just icky. I had 'em in Brooklyn. (You can't really live in NYC and never see a roach). I am very glad that my particular freak-out-at bug is earwigs. Much rarer.

Put your cereal and your sugar in airtight hard plastic containers. Take your bags of rice and do the same - put the mac and cheese boxes in the fridge, or failing that, at least in thick ziploc bags. Don't leave any food out, of any kind (fruit goes in the fridge!). Leave your kitchen light on overnight - sometimes that dissuades them. Clean the counters and dishes right after eating. Sweep crumbs off the floor.

If they don't find food in your place, they will start congregating elsewhere. You are competing with your neighbours here - dirtiest one gets the roaches. Odds are, if you are in a large building, they will occasionally show their face no matter what you do - someone's gonna attract them or import them eventually. But I got to the point where I'd see like one every other month or so.

Spray Raid or the like around the baseboards, any cracks in the floor or wall, under the sink, etc. Keep the cat out of the fresh-sprayed rooms for a few hours.

I am hoping that you only saw them in the kitchen or bathroom. In other rooms, where there is no food and water usually, they aren't found - and if you see them THERE (and not right next to the kitchen door etc.), then you worry.  Meaning that it is probably safe to put your cat's nightime snack in your bedroom - they won't go all that way. And you don't get an angry toe-biting cat.

Good luck. I know how gross it can be!!

p.s. what you REALLY don't want is bedbugs. :)

oh dead god
i wrote that on accident thinking about bed bugs.

oh dear god

our place is nyc small. its just a square with bedroom in a small other room on one side..and the bathroom+kitchen on the otherside of a large main room.
i saw it at like 4 am in the main room...
coming from the direction of the main door and kitchen.
so either it flew in a the screenless window...or it came under the door..it was running back towards the door and a killed it.

i am totally getting raid tonight and we are calling tomorrow.
it is a large building and new people just moved in.

it just makes me feel so dirty.
but at least now i will get my lazy guy to take the trash out very often. the classic fight we have.
hes even more afraid of them than i am.

in a twisted way i am glad because now i know his butt will be a neat freak neddy always.

i hope that i dont deal with it every month.
did your landlord spray regularly?
i kinda expected there might be these guys in the building because its large and old....

and oh...i already threw out all the food we had.
everything that wasnt in the fridge.
lol

did they go for your coffeepot if your forgot to empty the grounds?

Hi Anathema! I live in Brooklyn, and I see some of these things, too. Like Trustwomen said, it's impossible to live in NYC and not see them, lol.

That being said, it doesn't stop me from HATING these things with a passion. I even list them as one of me biggest phobias.

So, I saw one a few months back, and I haven't seen one since. I make sure the trash is taken out often. I clean the countertops day and night (and by that I mean, that before bed and when I get up). I do that because I know these things crawl through sewer pipes and whatnot and the amount of germs and bacteria that is on their bodies is wiggins-inducing. So I know that they do crawl on countertops, so I just lysol them down all the time.

The best way to get rid of them is not with Raid, surprisingly enough-and so I've read and so I've seen. Were I you-and I've been there, too-I'd use boric acid and bay leaves around the perimeter of your home. Anyplace where you think they can get in. You shouldn't have too much of a problem after that, and it won't be harmful to your cat.

If this is the first one you've seen, and you really don't see them again, I doubt you have a big problem, if at all.

I have had them too!  we live in the country and I think they just live out here.  So I use roach traps and that really seams to work.  Just put them in the cupboards and behind your fridge and anywhere else you can hide them.  I have not seen one in quite awhile.

now i am going to look like such a nut ball buying all these things...
lol

i feel like its a mini-war (maybe its the coffee talking)
and oh yeh..sleeping with the lights on now...

and i am going to get boric acid AND raid AND traps AND lysol
and staying awake all night with a shoe in my hand.

i though they were smart enough to stay out of places with cats?

ugh..i dunno..we thought of moving back to NY anyway...
and i know those are everywhere there. in L.A. it was TOTALLY gross how many there were.

guess this is the pre-season for mental preperation of buggy kingdom.

just WHYYYYYYYYYYYY do they have to have those gross legs with the pokeys. god i hate thier legs.

should i empty my bags and stuff before i go to someones house?
i am afraid to give them to someone.

p.s. i wanted to say thanks for chiming in everyone.

i am a little less freaked out...

i was worried they would just start pouring out of the walls or something ABSOLUTELY horrible like that.

glad to hear none of you got sick either.

They don't cause disease as far as I know (except asthma in kids, from the droppings).

And it depends on the cat. Mine just looks at them. My old cat used to eat them though.

Reminds me of a funny (ish) story...  About one time a roach did cause some pain

My freshman year of college, I lived in a dorm.  And we had the occasional roach...  wasn't much we could do to stop it.  Anyways, one night me and my roommate see one on our wall... and it's huge!  We start screaming and running, and finally realize that we need to kill it. 

Since we didn't have any raid or other roach killer, I grab my bottle of lysol.  I spray the heck out of it...  The roach falls to the ground and we can't find it anymore.  At this point, a girl next door knocks.  She is the itty bitty thin girl with bleach blond hair and the most southern accent you have ever heard.  She says "I was just makin sure yall were allright... I thought someone was havin sex in there with all the racket but then I heard a crash and thought I should come by and make sure yall are okay".  We assure her that we are okay, no s&m going on . . .  just trying to kill a roach. 

So we close the door, make a mad search around the room and still don't see the roach.  A few minutes later we hear the same southern speaking girl outside scream "!*#@ you, you are not going in my room".  We go out in the hall... and she is crying and holding her finger.  Apparently, when we closed our door... the lysol-drenched roach crawled out from under our room and started running into her room.  She was out in the hall talking to someone and saw it... she went to throw her shoe on it to kill it (she was holding the shoe in her hand) and somehow pulled her finger back in the process.  We had to take her to the hospital... she broke her finger trying to kill the roach... :-(  It was a long night...

So that being said, that's the only physical pain I have ever heard of roaches causing.  I recommend the roach traps... I have had good success with them in the dorms (after that night... we bought a whole box and didn't see any other roaches).

well i found the motherload and i havent slept in 24 hours.
i cant even eat. i had two saltines today. i feel so sick to my stomach.

i tried to eat a pizza but it tasted totally rotton to me.


i found like 6 dead ones under the kitchen sink...it has a leak....
we sprayed tonight to keep them away...

they are german cockroaches....

all the lights are on in the house.

tomorrow pest control guy....

read that its common to have a explosion in population in late summer....


i want to move again i think. i cant relax at all now.

called the landlord. bug guy was here in an hour.

thank god...i have been burned by so many sh*tty landlords i was making a mountain out of a molehill.

extermination guy said there wasnt an infestation anywhere that he could see. it looked like a few got in and the ones i found were long dead.so i didnt bring em. they spray regularly at this building to keep them dead and away. this was the first complaint about them.
he said the apt was fine and clean and they were probably coming up for the leaky thing and the dishes i left in the sink.

he sprayed the baseboards and said if they are everywhere they are going to come out running and dying in about 20 minutes.
its been a couple hours. no dead ones.

they are spraying all the apts.
the guy next to us had ants...hmmm...maybe he drew em in too.
its funny now..because you can smell nothing but bleach in the hall. everyone else is freaking out today like i was last night.
lol

it is the season for population explosion with these guys..so watch out! EHH EHH EHH EHH!

i wonder if the person above me had them...i kept hearing thumping after they sprayed up there.

thank god for my new on the ball landlord.
i want to freakin happy cry.

the chemicals he used also...they last 6 months for the spray and 1 year for the powder....so i can relax. he/s baiting the basement too. he said the come in a lot in basement drains especially when there has been a lot of rain (as there has)

i just feel a lot better that its not my fault.

Sorry about your problem. When I lived in a mobile home in Columbus,GA one year.  We had the big sob's that could fly.  When you tried to kill them they would fly at you.  Once I hit one with a shoe and cut it in half and the front half crawled away. Hows that for survival of the fittest?

This really wasn't my point. I had to sign up just to reply, even though I only weigh 95 pounds and eat like a horse. I have always wanted to gain and can't . nooo I don't have any thyroid issues, already checked.  Basically I just was amazed there were sooooo many people with sooooo much time on their hands to worry about a few roaches, even big ones.

I hope everyone knows Jesus cause if roaches are THAT disturbing to you what..., I wonder, will you do when say..........your house, (mobile home) burns down, your crack head husband blows your car up, and then leaves you with several months of bills piled up, all your money stolen and anything of any value, ie wedding band, my bass guitar,cds and dvds, etc. taken to a pawn shop so he could get that one more rock, and no car, and no job(couldn't get to it anyway)?  Roaches......? 

Through all this I never lost faith in God. If you like,  sometime I'll finish the storey and tell you how God came through for me, like Healways does. Oh and all that above was just the end of three years of total hell with this man. 

Moral to the storey.....You can't change anyone but yourself.  And LOL with your boyfriend never being a slob again.  They don't even see it! The mess I mean!

Just so you know, the average resident of NYC inadvertently eats 12 cockroaches each year.

Edit: Once again I'm suckered into an age old post.

Ahaha, talk about a coincidence! We live in an apartment attached to one neighbor on our right side. These people are the nastiest people I've ever met in my life. Trash is always littered around their apartment. Dog poop in the floor, walls that are supposed to be white are brown, pure nastiness. At any rate, I literally freaked out when I saw my first roach about 4 months ago. I called the landlord complaining and everything. I just today got done scrubbing my entire apartment from floor to ceiling. I took furniture apart and everything. It took me a week to get it all done, I was so thorough. I intend to buy some boric acid and put along the walls that join our apartments as well as around my entire side on the outside. Heck, I'm even going to climb into the attic and create a barrier with it between our apartments. I heard roaches won't cross it and I'm willing to try anything. I have to live beside them, it seems. Granted, I haven't seen one in about 2 weeks and when I did see any, it was only one or two within a month period. The thing is though, those things multiply like mad. When you see one, there's a nest somewhere. That's why I freak so badly over them, not because they're insects. At any rate, I'm hoping this boric acid does the trick and keeps them over there so they can wallow in all the filth they want to.

 

Edit: This is the second thread I've responded to that's about a year old! Arg

Yes.   Call your landlord and tell them to spray.  I wondered why we never ever had an exterminator to come by the house.  Then months later we noticed a couple.  Let me just say....it was the worst experience of my entire life.  I swear I almost had to be taken to the emergency room I was freaking out so bad.  All the home remedies didn't work.  After two months of threats to sue our landlord, they finally sprayed.  Guess what?  We never saw a flippin roach again!

Spraying for cockroaches is actually a simple and painless experience... it takes about two minutes and the buggies will be gone for at least six months. So if you think you have the little blighters, get the place sprayed asap and your problem will be over. (I hate them, but I live in Florida... they're BIG and they're inevitable!) Our neighbours on the other side were absolute SLOBS and after they moved out their apartment was swarming with the disgusting things, but we never saw a one of them! The only other time I saw a cockroach in the apartment it must have wandered in at night, because it was solitary...