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What to Do If Bed Bugs Are Only in One Room?

Discovering bed bugs in your home is a nightmare. 

So, if you find bed bugs in one of your rooms, the first thing you want to do is keep them from spreading. 

If you have bed bugs in only one room, you don’t want to take any items, such as clothes, blankets, or mattresses, out of the room unless they are in plastic. Also, bed bugs climb through walls and floors to get to other rooms, so you want to repair or cover any holes in the room. 

How to Keep Bed Bugs From Spreading to Other Rooms

A woman in a white shirt is sitting on the bed in a messy bedroom.

If bed bugs spread to another room, your problem can quickly worsen. 

Thus, you will want to follow the suggestions below to try to ensure the bed bugs stay put while you are treating the problem. 

1) Be Careful When Removing Items From the Infested Room

Although bed bugs can walk to other rooms, they are slow. 

So, the quickest way that bed bugs get around is when a person carries them somewhere else. 

And since they live inside of items and not on people, the most common way they enter a new area is when someone carries an object they’re living in to another spot. 

To prevent this from happening, you should be careful when moving any items that bed bugs like to live in, such as clothes, mattresses, blankets, sheets, pillows, and bags, from the room. 

However, as you probably already know, you need to take these objects out of the room to clean the bed bugs from them. 

Thus, you have to move them in a way that decreases the chances of the bed bugs falling off of them. 

The best way to prevent the transmission of bed bugs when you’re moving items is to wrap them in plastic bags before you take them out of the room. 

Then, bring the bags directly to the washing machine and dump in the contents. 

This method should keep the bed bugs from falling off the infested items when you move through your home. 

2) Seal Any Cracks in the Room’s Walls, Ceiling, and Floors 

As I said, bed bugs are small, so it takes them a long time to move from room to room. 

However, they can get to another room much faster by climbing through the ceiling, floors, and walls. 

And unfortunately, sealing up any cracks or holes in the room won’t necessarily keep the bugs from getting to another room this way because they are so tiny. 

But, if you close off any obvious holes, it will make it a lot harder for the bed bugs to find a crack to get through to infect other rooms. 

3) Don’t Enter the Room Unless You Need To 

Another good way to ensure the bed bugs stay in one room is to limit how many times you enter that room. 

Although bed bugs don’t live on people, they could cling to your clothes when you are in the affected room, especially if you get close to an infected area. 

So, if possible, you and your family should only enter that room if you have to, such as if you need to grab something or if you’re working on getting rid of the bugs. 

If the infested room is a bedroom, the occupant should sleep somewhere else if that is possible. 

Sleeping elsewhere will not only help minimize the movement of the bed bugs, but it will also keep that person from getting bitten. 

Furthermore, if that person is wearing clothes that have come out of that room, they should wash them before sleeping or even sitting somewhere else to prevent the spread of the bugs. 

Also, if a person enters the room for an extended period, and especially if they make contact with the bed, furniture, or any clothes, they should change and wash their clothes immediately. 

4) Vacuum Often 

If you have bed bugs in one room of your house, it isn’t hard for them to move to another room, even if you’ve taken precautions. 

Therefore, you need to do what you can to ensure that any bed bugs that have moved from the infected room don’t overtake another area of the house. 

And one of the best ways to get rid of bed bugs before they get the chance to migrate is to vacuum often. 

So, vacuum your carpets as well as furniture and rugs in other parts of the house to suck up any bed bugs that may have moved there. 

How Fast Do Bed Bugs Usually Spread Between Rooms?

Honestly, there is no “usual” amount of time it takes for bed bugs to spread to another room. 

However, if you are careless about handling potentially infested items or don’t start to take care of the problem quickly, they will probably spread faster. 

But, unfortunately, you can follow all the steps above and still have bed bugs infest another room fairly fast. 

Part of it is luck because if the bed bug colony in your house is particularly determined, it can spread to another room in less than a day, and you can’t do much to stop it. 

Do Bed Bugs Multiply Quickly?

Close-up photo of a bed bug.

Bed bugs do multiply rather fast. 

Typically, a female bed bug lays one egg every day. 

But, a bed bug can lay as many as seven eggs in a 24-hour period. 

It will then take the egg about ten days to hatch, and those bugs will be able to reproduce in six weeks. 

Thus, because of how long it requires for a bed bug to reach sexual maturity and the amount of time it takes eggs to hatch, it may at first seem like the bugs aren’t reproducing quickly. 

However, from just one female bed bug, you can end up with more than 100 bed bugs within a month. 

This high reproduction rate is why you need to kill as many bed bugs as you can and begin doing so as early as possible. 

How to Tell if Bed Bugs Have Infested Another Room

Since you need to start treating a bed bug infestation as quickly as possible and because bed bugs can migrate rapidly, you have to check the other rooms in your home for bed bugs often. 

Some of the ways you can tell if a room has bed bugs: 

  • If you see a bed bug
  • If you see any exoskeletons (these will be tiny and yellow)
  • If you see bed bug eggs (they look like small grains of rice)
  • If you find little dark spots on your bed (this is bed bug poop)
  • If you find small, red stains on your mattress (these could be crushed bed bugs)
  • If you see spots of blood on your bed from bed bug bites 
  • If you have bed bug bites on your body (small red bumps that are darker at the center)

If you believe bed bugs have infested another room in your house, you’ll want to start treating the area immediately. 

Can Bed Bugs Infest My Whole House?

Close-up photo of bed bugs on a mattress.

Technically, yes, bed bugs can infest a whole house, apartment building, or hotel. 

However, bed bugs usually stay around areas where humans frequently sit and sleep, such as mattresses, couches, and recliners. 

With that said, if you have a particularly awful infestation, you could find bed bugs just about anywhere. 

When bed bugs run out of space for their colony in their preferred areas, they start moving to other places, such as inside wallpaper, curtains, electrical appliances, and drawers. 

Conclusion 

If you have found bed bugs in one of the rooms of your home or apartment, you should do what you can to keep the infestation from spreading. 

The best way to ensure bed bugs don’t migrate to other rooms is to seal up any cracks in the affected room and be careful when you remove items from the infected space. 

You should also begin to get rid of the bed bugs immediately so that they don’t continue to spread.