This means war

My apartment seems to have a small-to-moderate cockroach problem.  It’s not my fault though, I promise.  I don’t leave food or water out and I regularly take out the trash.  I can, therefore, only conclude that my neighbors are to blame.  I’m not a particularly squeamish sort of person, so this didn’t actually strike me as an issue for the first few weeks of living here.  I kind of figured, “If I see them, I’ll kill them.”  This has long been my stance towards insects and spiders.  At my parents’ house I literally made a deal with the spiders in my room and the bathroom (don’t judge me) that if they stayed out of my bed and the shower I wouldn’t squish them.  They abided by it and my brother and sister were the only ones who ever got bitten.  (And yes, I absolutely made that deal after reading “The Seventh Son” by Orson Scott Card, but it worked.) 

Anyway, after a stray comment from my sister about how disease ridden cockroaches are, I started to get kind of disgusted and a little bit paranoid.  She has tons of little gems to toss out for any occasion because she’s in medical school and her world is full of unsavory things she feels the need to share with the rest of us.  

So I decided the thing to do would be to get some traps/poison and some caulk to seal up the baseboards.  I ran this plan by my boyfriend who was underwhelmed.  He seemed genuinely concerned about the caulk part of it in particular, since he didn’t want me to mess the apartment up even though my landlord has a distinctly hands-off approach.  I decided his fears were unfounded so I took myself over to Lowe’s to gear up.  I have two distinct approaches when I go into Lowe’s:

1.        I’m just a girl who doesn’t really know anything and couldn’t some manly man please come help me?  (This is when I don’t feel like reading signs to figure out where stuff is.  Usually if I look lost someone will ask if they can help, but if all the roaming employees are hiding there’s always someone at the paint counter.)

2.       I’m a woman on a mission, don’t you dare assume I need help just because I’m a girl.  (Striding purposefully through Lowe’s does give me a sense of badass-ness, I’ll admit.)

So I came home with poison bait and caulk.  (And a caulk gun.  How awesome am I for owning a caulk gun?)  Dilemma:  do I put out the bait first letting them take the poison back to their nests and then seal everything up once they’re dead to prevent a new batch or do I seal them out and then put out the traps in case any got in?  The decision was made more difficult by the fact that this was the first I’d heard that cockroaches have nests.  (I do acknowledge that it's ludicrous to think that any amount of caulk could completely trap cockroaches.  They're crafty devils.)  But I decided to put out the bait first since that was a lot less labor intensive than caulking my entire apartment. 

My boyfriend expressed concern again about the whole caulking idea, so I explained that I had gotten the trim and molding kind that you can paint over and scrapers so there’s no excess and that I had caulked before.  His response was along the lines of “Oh, I didn’t know that.”  But it was said in such a way that it reminded me of the way he reacted when he found out I has scored the same as him on the ACT in high school.  “YOU got that?!”  To be frank, it was not a very flattering reaction.  Sometimes I think he forgets that I do have a real college degree even though I don’t happen to be doing anything with it.  Anyway, I took the high road and did not remind him who has to borrow whose hammer because apparently only one of us is handy enough to have real tools.  (He actually has a lot more than I do but mine are more useful in an everyday sense and also more accessible, so I win.)   I haven’t gotten around to caulking yet because, let’s be serious, that’s going to be a lot of work.

UPDATE:  Okay, so I decided to rearrange my living room because it was kind of cramped and as a general rule I like to have a big open space in the middle of rooms and that’s just not what was happening.  After I moved the filing cabinet in the corner by my desk, I discovered a hole in the wall.  I don’t really know how to describe this hole, because it kind of seemed like it was supposed to be there.  It looks like a metal plate embedded in the wall that has cut-outs and part of the plate is covered but the other part isn’t.  


Now the first thought in my mind was “How in the world do I not remember that being there when I moved in 3 months ago?” and the second was “Well that explains why there were always cockroaches by my desk.”  That was something that had always bothered me since it made no sense.  I always saw way more creepy crawlies by my desk than in the kitchen or bathroom.  Granted, I spend more time at my desk than either of those other places so I figured that was why.  Turns out it was the gaping hole in the wall.  Clearly that needed to be fixed.  


My first thought was to seal it shut with tape (I have painter’s tape so it wouldn’t damage the wall), but I started getting antsy about it not sealing that well since the walls are textured.  Then I remembered:  I have caulk.  Mwahaha!  Hopefully that hole wasn’t actually for anything because it is now completely sealed up.  I feel like I should win some kind of amateur handyman award.