Many beds (like mine) have designs that don’t really lend themselves well to this. I have a sleigh bed which doesn’t have individual legs. It has two big pieces of wood at the head and the foot of the bed that touch the floor. So for each end of the bed I would need to coat all four sides of a piece of wood roughly 4.5 feet wide x 2 inches deep. I don’t want to damage the wood and I don’t want Vaseline on the carpet. I also don’t want it out where my pets can get to it.

If the above applies to you, what can you do? The Bedbug Beacon is a nice choice. You can see the most popular ways of catching bed bugs here.

First, the typical bed bug bite symptoms are raised bumps that tend to get very itchy. Some people refer to this as a bed bug rash. The itching can drive you up the wall and the appearance of the bites can be embarrassing as well. To deal with the itching and help the bites heal, try a hydrocortisone cream.

Second, treating the bites doesn’t fix the underlying problem: the bed bug infestation. You can get some relief from the bites and you might be able to cut down on them a bit through various methods but there is a good chance you’re going to need a bed bugs exterminator. The longer you wait, the bigger you allow your bed bug infestation to grow and spread, making it harder to get rid of them as time goes on.

The way detection dogs are ideally used is to point out places that should be more thoroughly inspected. When a dog comes across an area and has a hit, that area should be further examined for bed bugs.

Why?

Bed bug treatment for mattresses is fairly straight forward: you find bed bugs and you kill them. Box springs are harder to treat however.

Box springs have a more complex construction than mattresses. Usually there is plastic hardware on the bottom and staples that hold a mesh onto the bottom. Bed bugs can hide and lay eggs under and around the hardware and the staples. And what is worse is that they can get underneath the mesh and infest the inside of your box spring. While it’s possible to remove the mesh, the inside of a box spring itself can be tricky to properly treat.

So if you only have enough money for one encasement, make it the box spring.

If you read those and came back here, you might be saying “Hey — I wanted information on do-it-yourself bed bug extermination, not warnings!” Understood. But maybe you haven’t spent enough time on the web doing research to learn about other people’s DIY experiences?

There is a good chance that “do-it-yourself bed bug elimination” is really more like “do-it-yourself the first time around and then call the exterminator back when that doesn’t work out like you thought it would”. I’m making a little joke here but seriously, DIY bed bug elimination doesn’t have the best track record. Even professionals find it difficult to exterminate bed bugs. Exterminating bed bugs is not the same as dealing with ants, cockroaches or termites. Bed bugs are hard to kill.

I spoke with an exterminator about DIY bed bug extermination a while back. He told me that many times people will call him out to assess their situation. After they hear the cost involved they sometimes decide they’re going to try to take care of the problem on their own. A short time later (and after plenty of stress and frustration), those same people will call him again and hire him.

If you are really bent on doing the job yourself, your best bet is to plunk down a few bucks for Bed Bug Handbook: The Complete Guide to Bed Bugs and Their Control, available from the invaluable Techletter.

Bed bugs don’t hide just on your mattress either. They can hide in the bed frame or even inside the mattress. Don’t forget that bed bugs will often hide outside the bed in furniture, clothing, pictures and door frames, drapes, etc. It can be tough to tell just how many of them there are.

Bed bug eggs are nearly invisible to the naked eye. Even if you think you’ve found all the bed bugs hiding around your room, there is a good chance they have hidden their eggs somewhere. So even if you think you have a fairly good idea of how bad your infestation is, you could be overlooking the eggs.

If you’re in doubt, call a bed bugs exterminator to come assess your situation.