A terrible thing happened – I put on a jacket, under which a cockroach was hiding. When I took off the jacket from the hanger, I immediately noticed him, the cockroach ran and tried to hide, then the bear cub slapped him in time. From that moment on, I started a massive house cleaning and learning all the ways to deal with cockroaches, since I already lived in apartments with cockroaches a couple of times in my life, and it was the worst thing you can imagine in your home. In this apartment, since we moved into it more than 5 years ago, we have not met a single cockroach. So this was the first cockroach that caught my eye inside the apartment. What to do now?
First, I carefully examined the surroundings of the place where we met the cockroach. I completely freed the floor and all the corners where we kept packages and all sorts of things. Freed up all the nooks and crannies and moved all the furniture to the center of the rooms, which moves. I studied all the places where cockroaches usually like to live – corners, baseboards, a place under the bathroom and under the sinks, the whole kitchen. Cockroaches live in secluded corners, become active in the dark, and love moist and warm places where there is some kind of food. I quickly did a big cleaning, washed the floor everywhere with an antiseptic (floor cleaner), removed all unnecessary things from the floor to the top shelves of the cabinets, collected all the garbage and threw out as much as possible that could be thrown away.
Secondly, I transferred all the products in the kitchen (bread, cookies, etc.) into a double layer of bags, and put sugar and other cereals into hermetically sealed containers. Wiped off the dust. Wiped wet spots. Removed open water from easy access. In general, dryness and cleanliness is the key to success in the fight against cockroaches, but not a 100% guarantee. They say that cockroaches can even survive the consequences of a nuclear war, and they only need a crumb of bread and a bar of soap to feed them. There are many myths about cockroaches, but the fact remains that if cockroaches have settled in you, then it will be extremely difficult to remove them. You will have to do repairs at the same time (change wallpaper, physically remove cockroach nests, etc.) and carry out chemical persecution of cockroaches with special means, while staying in housing will not work, you will have to leave for a couple of weeks until the “poison” (insecticide) works and will not fade.
On the same day, we went to the household department of the supermarket for cockroach remedies, there were the following options:
- cockroach traps,
insecticidal chalk, - dichlorvos aerosol.
In most cockroach remedies, food attractors (tasty food for cockroaches) are added so that cockroaches would like to climb into the trap and eat the bait, in fact, the traps work on the principle of a mousetrap. If you are not sure that cockroaches have already wound up and settled in you, then I think that you should not lure them from outside with traps. Since during the cleaning I did not meet another cockroach, we decided not to put traps and other means with food attractors inside the apartment for the time being, but to use chalk and dichlorvos. It turned out that several possible ways of penetration of cockroaches from neighbors or from the corridor where the garbage chute is located lead to our apartment, these are:
- holes for internet and telephone wires,
- windows, cracks in the house, door,
- water drain in the bathroom, kitchen, toilet,
- air extract,
- things we bring in from the store.
We found cracks and holes, smeared them with chalk along the contour, sprinkled dichlorvos inside the holes and a little from the outside and went for a walk. After this incident with the cockroach, I began to mop the floor every day and inspect all corners and secluded places. So far, not a single cockroach has caught my eye.