Jerseygirl

robin1234

Our first home together in the US was a low income apartment in Somerville, MA. We very soon realised that we had three different species of cockroach competing for attention there - German, American, and brown-banded. The German cockroach is the common cockroach in the north east, small, brown, and moves fast. The American cockroach is less common, very impressive creature, fairly large, light in colour, and it flies around at night, which can keep you awake. The rental agent woman onsite was a wee bit racist, she was certain that the cockroaches emanated from the apartments of the Chinese families in the building, their kitchen hygiene wasn't up to Boston-Irish standards according to her...

Anyway when we removed the floral pattern contact paper that the previous tenant had put up as a splash back around the stove, we eliminated one of the roach hiding places.

moneypenny20

It took us a year of house spraying, bug bombing etc to get rid of the German Cockies. They are a fricking nightmare.

robin1234

Yeah my wife dislikes roaches. We never got rid of them in the apartment, since if you kept them at bay they'd just come in from elsewhere in the building. I've never really been that bothered by cockroaches, though I'm perfectly willing to kill them. After living in Somerville, we moved back to England and lived in a big old early nineteenth century building in Bath. It was seriously overrun by oriental cockroaches, and those things were massive, much bigger than Massachusetts roaches.

Beaverstate

Cockroaches while quite uncommon in the Pacific Northwest can be found if you look hard. I have yet to see one.

Nutmegger

I can deal with roaches (or could, not sure how I would do these days!), but would have been out there in two seconds if it had been a mouse problem! We had a big D-Con budget in that place . . . but for $99 a month rent, what can one expect!

yellowroom

Mice are easy - I have two cats and apparently mice are very tasty. And my brother's Jack Russell can take care of any, er, bigger rodents that take up residence in the garden shed.

The worse infestation I had in a house was slugs - it was a "cheap" workman's cottage built mid-C19, and the ground was only 6 inches below the floorboards - they easily found their way up along pipes and between floorboards and you could see their slime trails on the carpet in the morning. Spring and autumn were bad when the ground was damp and cool. Apparently slugs are not so tasty for cats, but squish between your toes quite spectacularly if you stand on them.

Nutek

Rete

Do you have yours for brekkie or lunch?

Rete

I'm the opposite. I can live with the mice (they are so easy to trap) but roaches gross me out. Thankfully, even though I always lived in an apartment the building had an exterminator that came every month and I never saw one. After I plugged up the hole under the kitchen sink that took care of the mice. The poor cat lost her plaything.

Pulaski

I think this great advice for a free source of nutritious protein would be welcomed over on the Canadian "Cheap Eats Choices" thread.

livinginnyc

I'm late to this thread (as always) but holy s... @ this.

Throws my freak out after waking up to find a spider biting my leg a week or so ago into insignificance *big time*!

Also... The Bronx... That's a wild place to begin with!

robin1234

Well, like most places, there's good & bad - most of the Bronx is perfectly civilised. Zoo, botanical gardens, several excellent colleges & universities, beautiful parks etc....

Nutmegger

You are right; I lived in a long-established Irish neighborhood, within walking distance of the botanical gardens, which was just starting to become Puerto Rican. But this was in the 1970s, Howard Cosell's the "Bronx is burning" days, when there was rather a lot of bad around in the southern part of the borough!

robin1234

God's own country, the Bronx. If we move to NYC that'd be where we'd go. Might need a set of ear plugs, having lived in rural areas for many decades.