Divorce.

Flying ants. We bought a new house that had a major problem with “alates”.

Tried dealing with them on our own, but they just kept coming and because there was no food supply for them, they’d die anyway in 24 hours or so. Our windows got full of dead ants.

Called Orkin. They came out, did their thing, gone in 24 hours.

https://www.orkin.com/pests/ants/winged-ants

We got roaches from an Amazon package, I suspect. My wife and I are both compulsively clean people, but we live in an older place so there is ostensibly decades worth of random organic material around to sustain roach colonies. It started one spring with seeing some instars around the kitchen every few days and then it became full roaches about a week later. I did not take it seriously at first and just treated with hardware store sprays and powders. This was insufficient.

What eventually worked was baits and a little chemical called Alpine WSG. I bought a sprayer and basically coated the entire house in it twice, six weeks apart. We have not seen a single roach since then. I respray once per year just in case.

Also, boric acid doesn’t work with German roaches. It is a waste of time. If you solved roach problem with that or diatomaceous earth, then you had a entry problem, not an infestation.

We also had racoons breeding in our attic at one point, which is a very awkward situation because I felt bad trapping them so I just waited for them to leave and then sealed where they were getting in.

As a student, I heard scratching noises behind the drywall over my bed. Assuming it were mice, I got some mouse traps and set them up in the attic. No success, although the bait did vanish.

So I took a better light with me and found a wasps nest between the roof tiles and the plasterboard.

Borrowed a large bottle of pressurized CO2 and froze those suckers to death.

I lived in a cheap studio in Boston that was infested with roaches. Every 3-4 months I would spray Raid where the walls met the floor and that always worked well until they gradually started appearing again.

I lived in another studio that got a bedbug infestation. My building’s management paid for the place to be heat treated – they wheeled in two giant space heaters and had them powered by a generator on a truck five stories below on the street. I never saw another one again, but it destroyed all my books.

Nowadays I’m way more picky about where I live and I haven’t had any pest issues in over a decade.

I was once renting a room, where due to part my lack of cleanliness (basically not throwing out garbage frequently enough, i waited for a week or two) and my rooms window being right above a flower bed (and i kept the windows open for the most time) and my room being moist for the most time (i dried clothes in my room) I got lots of small red bugs (hundreds or thousands). they did not bite, but they were annoying. I had a few bad weeks, so i also did not care about them at the time.

To get rid of them, I had a multi part strategy, basically 1 was trying to physically force them out - by raising the room temp to high, and cycling window open and close, and also cleaning out my room better (taking garbage every 2 or 3 days), worked partially well (maybe more than half gone). Other was to use a chemical irritant (i used a mix of dettol and water) to spray on their usual spots, and llet them be dry otherwise, and stopped drying clothes inside. Once I got to getting rid of them, I got it in a week or so.

Also where i live currently, it is musquitos. They are everywhere where I live, kinda a public health issue which is largely outside our scope. I cant really do much against them. General advice is to keep surroundings clean and minimise their breeding spots. My folks do try to kill them with the zapping rackets, but that is almost lost cause.

Bed bugs made us burn our furniture. In the end we still paid several hundred dollars for an exterminator cause they were that persistent.

Where I live, there are American cockroaches. The good thing is that they don’t nest in homes, so their presence isn’t a commentary on your cleanliness. But they do wander into homes looking for food. And guys, they’re huge! Like you can hear them crawling.

I asked the pest control guy if there was a way to be finally rid of them and he said “move”.

A few years ago we had a problem with teenage girls in the bathroom. Basically made it unusable for most of the day.

Glad to say they have now graduated college and the problem worked itself out.

Nearly every NYC apartment has pest issues. Landlords don’t actually give a fuck about resolving them, so I end up doing most of it. I’ve had roaches, mice, and all colors of mold.

Mice are the most annoying. Unfortunately glue traps are the only traps that work on them, but I would check them often and Ol’ Yeller any stuck mice I found with a crossbow. Instant lights out.

I’ve had fruit flies before that must have come in on some produce, have to be on it to clear them, leave out any fruit/veg scraps and they come out (out being tossed in the trash/green bin too, anything open air). Drop of dish soap, water and vinegar in a high walled glass or jar is the way to do it, I used balsamic but malt or wine vinegar works too, just leave that out and it’ll do its job.

My current place we jokingly call the spider house, have a bunch of house spiders around (cats love them) and a few orb-weavers, garden and wolf spiders outside, pretty much anything native isn’t a threat to humans or cats, they do a great job of taking out any pests, rarely see flies inside these days. Spiders and centipedes I’ll leave alone, they’re beneficial to have around.

Childhood spring one year, conditions were perfect for millipedes. The basement floor was covered in them. I mean covered with the floor barely visible.

They weren’t damaging or dangerous, just disgusting. My dad put on his outdoor shoes and just walked around in tiny steps smashing them. He walked for hours. Then scraped them up with a plastic snow shovel and threw them outdoors for the birds to go wild. Then walked some more.

No other spring since has resulted in those sorts of numbers. It was interesting to see my dad’s reaction: the disgust and fascination and satisfaction. God help him if he ever discovers pimple popper videos and the like, we would lose him to the algorithm.

Cockroaches. It was bad. They were everywhere. You couldn’t open a door without them falling from the cracks in the doorframe on your face.

Boric acid is what helped as recommended by reddit. We used to clean, and spray with Pyrethrins before that but that only kills the visible ones. Most of the roaches are in their holes and you’ll never reach them like that.

What’s great about boric acid is that it kills slowly meaning they can infect each other before they die in a chain reaction. They infect even the hidden ones when they go groom each other.

So clean the area, dry it, then just spread the powder where they usually hang out. It’ll take a week to notice any effects. Apply again if area gets wet.

Another great thing is unless you ingest a huge amount or inhale it in your lungs, boric acid is mostly safe for humans. Unlike the sprays which always gave us symptoms.

Old house. Mice are seasonal for us. We get one or two in the fall when they start looking for shelter for the winter, and again in the spring when they start exploring/multiplying. We used traps, Now that we have cats though, they mostly stay away or get caught.

I had a pair of foxes raise a litter of kits under my garden shed. They were so cute and fun to watch!

Well they left me with fleas. I had to seal off the foundation of the shed, cut holes in the floor, and drop some nasty pesticides (phosgene) under, and seal it back up.