Last month, my husband and I moved into a beautiful Arizona home. It is probably the nicest place I have ever lived since leaving the comfort of my high school home. From high school, I went to college, where I lived in a dorm for a year. For the next two years, I lived in an apartment in a 12-story building which was full of dirty college students. You don’t even want to know what that trash room smelled like, though our apartment was reasonably clean. My last year in college, I lived in a very old house with 9 other people, some of which had very questionable cleaning habits. After college, I moved in with my husband (then fiance) into an apartment with very cheap rent and neighbors whose dog peed on me everytime I saw it. They didn’t really seem to think it was a big deal…luckily for the dog, it was always on my work jeans which smelled like old food and stale beer because I was bartending/serving at the time. We didn’t live there for long, and we moved into a townhouse, which was decent. We lived there for 3 years together. Then my husband got a job across the country, and I moved into an apartment in a brownstone home in Philadelphia. The place was awesome, but very, very old. Then after moving in with my friends and my mom temporarily, we moved into the wonderful house we live in now in Arizona.
The reason I went through this detail living history is because out of all of the place I have lived on my own, about half of them had the potential to be true roach motels, but it is only the nicest one that has ever had cockroaches. It wasn’t the huge college apartment complex, or the 200 year old row home in Philadelphia. Nope, it’s this great house that we otherwise love.
Since August, I have been at war with the roaches. We’ve had at least two species – the big creepy ones in our bathroom, and the small ones in our kitchen. There may be more than one species of small ones. To qualify the problem, it’s not that bad. It’s not like everytime you open a cabinet, 10 roaches come flying out at your face, so don’t be afraid to come and visit. They only come out after around 11 pm. Some nights I see none, other nights, I’ll see a few. Below is a summary the arsenal I have against the roaches…
Methods that don’t do shit
Killing individual roaches – while this method makes you feel like you are actually doing something and can be quite emotionally satisfying, for every one you see, there are 1000 others inside your walls spawning.
Raiding your house – Raid does nothing but make your house smell like a toxic wasteland. It will kill an individual roach in a very slow and painful way, but it smells so bad that the roaches avoid wherever you sprayed. All you are really doing is giving you and your pets lung cancer.
Roach motels – those little stick-up things with holes the roaches can crawl into. The people who lived here before left like 60 of them stuck up in the kitchen, and clearly, they did not work at all. I think all they do is attract roaches into our cabinets.
Geckos – I have found a number of small geckos in our house, but they don’t seem to even put a dent in the roach population.
Cat – The cat shows no interest in the roaches, but sure likes to eat the geckos.
Obsessively cleaning your house*** – this will make you feel like you are doing something productive, but roaches will eat ANYTHING. If you already have them, unless you douche everything in bleach before you go to bed, they will find and eat the tiniest, tiniest little crumb. I found one eating a solitary crumb off of the dining room table. Martha Stewart couldn’t clean a kitchen well enough to make a roach starve.
Methods that seem to do shit
Professional exterminator – this actually did work. It got rid of the large cockroaches in our bathroom entirely, but did not work so well for the small cockroaches in the kitchen. A drawback is that it’s relatively expensive, and he would probably have to come back a few times to eradicate them and some of the chemicals they use are very dangerous for you and your pets.
Boric acid – ask your grandma how she kills ants and she’ll tell you to mix Borax with powdered sugar. Boric acid is a powder that is not terribly toxic to humans or pets, but deadly to roaches. It has no odor, and supposedly tastes OK, so roaches don’t avoid it like they do Raid. A light dusting on countertops and in cabinets lets roaches walk through without noticing it, then they clean the powder off of themselves and die. Because it doesn’t kill them instantly, they carry it bad to their nest and kill everyone else too.
I am confident in the Boric acid method. After the first night, I found like 4 carcasses…who knows how many more there are that died where I can’t find them. I have been seeing less and less alive ones and more carcasses. Online sources say it can take up to a month to work fully, but that it can eradicate the whole population. Because I am extremely impatient and can’t passively sit by for a month while this works, when I do see a roach, I douche it in boric acid powder so it can carry it back to it’s nest.
I think after all of them are gone, I will caulk up all of the crack around the cabinets and countertops just to be super safe…but I want them gone first!
***I still obsessively clean the kitchen. The reason I put an asterisk next to “Obsessively cleaning your house” is because this is a good roach prevention method, but not necessarily a good eradication method. If you take out the trash often, don’t leave crumbs or dirty dishes around, roaches will be less enticed into your home.
