Weddingbee boards

SO and I found our "dream" apartment in December after months and months and MONTHS of searching. Newly remodeled, hardwood floors, nice updated (CLEAN) bathroom and kitchen, dishwasher, yard, fireplace, in-unit (not coin-op) laundry, pets allowed, painting allowed, all utilities included. Sounds awesome, right?

Well, ugh. I've been living here since January 1st (SO spends about 2 days/week here but lives most of the week in Indiana, PA...he moves in full-time next Friday though) and this place is just. too. small. It's so shitty. The floors are warped making it impossible to put certain furniture in certain places. Hardly any of the outlets are GFI. There is only one closet, and its sliding doors are too big for it so the middle 2' are impossible to access. The basement is so gross looking that I refuse to go in it, making it useless for storage. But really, the pièce de résistance is the utter infestation of highly active house centipedes that has sprung up ever since the weather got warm. I see at LEAST one every day, most of which are small enough that I can comfortably vacuum up. But still, it's annoying, gross, and gives me a jolt every time, and sometimes there are bigger ones that cause more stress.

...continued 2 hours later:

You will never believe this. Literally as I was writing that post I leaned over my bed to see the most monstrous, huge, disgusting house centipede in the world. It literally stood about 1.5" tall and 4" long. I SCREAMED at the top of my lungs and ran to the kitchen and hyperventilated on the phone to SO. He suggests I call our only Pittsburgh friend to come kill it for me. So I do. He says he can come up to help. So I spend the next 20 minutes frozen on the spot in my kitchen, when what do I see but ANOTHER. FREAKING. CENTIPEDE on the floor in there.

Friend finally arrives and we do not find the big one anywhere. I give him an empty wrapping paper tube to poke stuff with, and he literally pokes at every single thing in my bedroom and living room (the only 2 real rooms in the apartment), he moves my bed, tears the covers down, goes through the closet, behind the TV, under the couch, in the bathroom, in the toilet/toilet bowl, under the sink, and even all the way down into the basement...nothing.

But get this...while I'm standing there watching him poke at stuff, ANOTHER ONE crawls in between my feet. And I know these are all different ones because they're all different colors...some are red, some are grey, some are black. That's 5 I've seen just today (there was one in the bedroom this morning that I did vacuum up because it was small, and one in the living room earlier that night that I lost sight of before I could take care of it.)

Ugh. So now I'm spending the night on the same friend's couch and I'm probably going to couch surf the rest of the week until SO gets here. And, after only 4 months in this place, 4 months which were spent pouring money and time and sweat and effort into fixing this place up because we thought it was going to be our long-term home...we're going to move again. I know that every house/apartment is going to have bugs, centipedes included, but the amount of them in this house is just absolutely ridiculous.

Which was the original point of this rant...Pittsburgh bees, HOW the heck do you find cheap apartments that don't suck around here? All we want is a 1br + den or 2br apartment with a dishwasher and on-site laundry, preferably utilities included OR cheap rent without utilities (our budget is ilke $750/mo TOPS including utilities). We have no pets or kids. And yet everything on Craigslist under those parameters are complete, utter shitholes, or in Homewood/Braddock/Wilkinsburg/etc. And then when we do find that miracle goldmine Craigslist post, by the time we respond to it (even like 1hr after it was posted) it's already taken.

Help us please...we are desperate. I don't feel safe or comfortable in that house anymore and it's to the point where I absolutely dread waking up in the morning, I can't relax anywhere there, and I take as long as possible to walk home from work so that it's less time I have to spend there. I have not felt relaxed in weeks because I'm constantly looking all around me to check for bugs.

EWW EWW EWW. I'm so sorry about that!! I get box-elder beetles all over my apartment and that's bad enough.. I think I'd jump out of my skin if I saw a centipede. Definitely call a pest control service.. or your landlord! That's terrible.

I feel all itchy. I hate bugs!! I sympathize.

@noritake22: The thing with house centipedes is that there's not really any good way to exterminate them. They're like stink bugs kinda (except far more disgusting!) in the way that you can't call an exterminator to get rid of them. At least no exterminator I've ever heard of...

@NDBee: I think our house might be the exception to that "usually" LOL. Lucky us. Because seriously at least the past month I've been seeing at least one every single day, probably more like 2 or 3 some days, so that's at least 30 bugs I've seen in as many days. Insanity. My dad's house had kind of a lot of them too but even his house would be like one per month or so. SO's parents' house is the same way...once in a blue moon. And my old apartment (which happens to be the place I'm staying at tonight...funny how that worked out) I saw 2 the entire 16 months I lived here. I will have to find a way to disable images and search for some way to get rid of them (or go with noritake's suggestion of an exterminator/pest control, if I find one that exists) but I've been afraid to because I don't want to see pictures of them on the pages haha.

@Kant: Holy crap. I hate that. I searched for solutions to spiders once and cried.

@Leahhh: Eeeeew I hate beetles too ugh. Especially because the only real method to get rid of them is trap and release (or flush in the toilet) because you can't even smash those. Ugggh barf.

@Leahhh: It's especially bad now that Google puts image search results right on the main search page, and they're not put on the page as regular images so telling Firefox to not load images doesn't block them! And a lot of websites use things other than the standard <img> tag to put up their images as well...definitely not something I want to risk!! I'll have to get my not-afraid-of-bugs friend to research for me...

@NDBee: Ahaha gross. Related story!: A coupe weeks ago I walked into my bathroom after having just been in there a few minutes prior and found a gigantic centipede smushed into my floor. Like I had stepped on it the previous time I'd gone in and not even noticed it. THANK GOODNESS I was wearing shoes, aaahhhbllblllagagllghlblg it makes me gag just thinking about what if I wasn't. And that bug is still on my floor to this day, I put a little rug over it but SO doesn't want to clean it up and I definitely won't...so there it will stay until we move, I guess.

Ugh, I feel your pain. When we lived in Ontario, our apartment had these and it freaked me the hell out. Once I was ironing and one dropped right in front of my face onto the ironing board. I screamed and slammed the iron on top of it...needless to say, that shirt was never worn again and I had to donate the iron and get a new one because I couldn't get past the idea of ironing all of our clothes with something that had once had centipede guts all over it.

Now that we've moved halfway across the country, I don't see these anymore. Thank god!

LOL you guys, I am so not brave. When I saw this big fucker in my bedroom I screamed so loud that I choked and hurt my throat, and when I called SO he couldn't even understand what I was saying because I was blubbering and shaking so hard. Bravery that is not.

@Gabrielle123: We're looking for apartments in the east end! I shop at Whole Foods so I like to be relatively close to there. Tell me your secrets woman.

@linguo42: Where do you put that stuff? Just like...along the walls/in corners/under doors/around areas they usually go? Because I don't love the idea of coming home to find a pile of centipedes feasting right out in the open like that, and then having to vacuum up their dead bodies later. *shudder*

Thanks for everyone's suggestions...you guys are the best :)

@Mrs.tobe: Wow...seriously? That was not what I needed right now. I had to turn images off in my browser just to come back and reply to this. I'd suggest deleting that...you're going to give a lot of bees an unfair shock when they scroll down.

@mrs.jk: OMG that's exactly how I feel! When I come home from work every day I walk slowly around the whole apartment and check all the walls and floors and ceilings. 99% of the time I find one somewhere. When I have to go to the bathroom I check all around the toilet, under the toilet seat, etc. before I sit down. And I NEVER go without shoes in my house now, and I totally moved my bed away from the wall too. It's such a crappy feeling to not feel safe or comfortable in your own home :(

Send me some good apartment vibes guys, I've got a viewing set up for a new place already in about an hour! Cheaper rent and more sqft than we currently have, and in a way better location. Fingers crossed!!

@mrs.jk: Thanks! The apartment unfortunately was just too small...it claimed it had more sqft than what the place we currently live in has but either it was inaccurately measured or it was just a poor use of space, because it was TINY. Sucks, too, because the building was wonderfully clean and maintained. But this was just the first one so hopefully we find a better one soon.

Good luck! I remember I was ready to live in a shoebox if it meant that I would never feel that jolt again of seeing one of the little beasties

im so sorry you are dealing with this. I have not had to deal with centipedes but I have had to deal with spiders. lots and lots of spiders. dude, can I just say that spiders literally make me freeze up to where I cant breathe or move? i mean really its that bad. they just freak me the f out. so this problem that you have really does hit home. the last apartment i had with my ex there was a trillion spiders. Mostly those beige ish ones not sure what kind they are and a few tree spiders that would get in from outside but on occasion there would just be some monsters that would come out of hiding. One in particular was just amazingly disgusting.it made a nice little web in our dining room window. This thing looked so exotic. It was like a pearl white kind of color or maybe milky white is a better way to describe it, with brown stripes and a brown spot on its back. I stood in the same spot, just like you did, for about a half hour while a relative made his way over to help me kill it (SO was at work). when he got there and tried to kill it the thing took about 5 or 6 good whacks to die and it literally popped when it was crushed because it was like rock hard. it went up into a ball once we started attacking it and it was just rock hard. So gross. Im sorry I cant offer much advice on how to get rid of em but I just wanted to share this so you know that you are most def not alone.