This is what our apartment looked like when we got home from work on Monday:

No we weren’t robbed. This is how our apartment looked when we prepped for the bed bug treatment. That’s our dining area filled with stuff from our closets, under the bed, other miscellaneous things.

Yep, that’s our bath tub full of trash bags filled with bedding, clothes and shoes. And that’s our bed standing up (there’s nothing else in our bedroom aside from furniture).  And that’s our entry way filled with more trash bags filled with more clothes.

And that’s not even the half of it.  We’re using the vacant studio apartment next door to store most of our clothes.

This process totally sucked before the first treatment when we had to spend an entire day prepping our apartment by cleaning out our entire bedroom and all of our closets and washing pretty much every fabric we own. But then we went to Florida and got a break for the weekend. And it hasn’t been that bad.

But at this point we’re starting to get overwhelmed by the clutter, by the amount of laundry that keeps piling up, at the fact that we can’t find things.  A lot of my pants are snug because they had to go through the dryer and I usually don’t put a lot things in the dryer, and definitely not on high heat (recommended to kill bed bugs). And we’re only halfway through!

A bottle of shampoo spilled in the tub (unbeknownst to us) so when we pulled the bags of bedding out to wash so we could go to bed on Monday night, we ending up getting shampoo on our floor and then we stepped in it and almost slipped. Then when we got back from the laundry room, I got some shampoo on my sock which then got on my leg when I sat cross-legged on the couch.

Packing to go home for Christmas is going to be such a treat. At this point I don’t even remember what clothes I own.  We’ll spend most of the night tonight doing laundry. And at $2 per wash and $2 per dry, this isn’t a cheap process either.  (Though I really can’t complain because our building has been wonderful and is paying 100% of the exterminator’s fees.)

But there is one source of joy in our apartment:

It’s not our best Christmas effort but it’s doing the job. There are four presents under the tree: two for Mike and two for me!  I’m excited to open them at Mike’s parents house on Christmas morning.