nstead we arrived and had to spend half the day cleaning before we could move any of our stuff in.

After only being in the apartment for 1 week my fiance began noticing red marks on her back. A few days later I started seeing similar marks on myself. At the time we had no idea it was from bed bugs. All our furniture was new and our bed came from our previous place. Later we learned that the bugs can continue to survive in an empty apartment for up to a year without feeding. Once we suspected beg bugs I began to rip apart our mattress and boxspring. At first I didn't see anything, but once I pulled the material away from the wood of the box spring I found them in all stages of life.

The next day I phoned the landlord. She denied that it was her fault and that we must have brought the bugs to the apartment. She said we would have to pay for the exterminator. Clearly she thought I was stupid and didn't know my rights. After setting her straight she sent for an exterminator the next day. I brought everything that could fit into a dryer to a laundry mat and threw out our mattress and box spring. It took 2 full days to get everything back in order. Two weeks later we found more bugs and called the exterminator again and told the landlord that we're breaking the lease. She didn't mind us leaving since it's the middle of the summer so it would be easy to find a new tenant.

After 2 months of sleeping on the floor and waking up every hour to turn on the lights and scour the room like a crazy person we finally prepared to move. This was the worst move of my life. It took me a full week off work to prepare everything to a point where I knew we wouldn't bring any of the bugs with us.

The night before we moved out the people upstairs were moving as well and we noticed that they threw out a mattress and futon. They also looked just as pissed off about the move as we did. So I'm assuming the problem wasn't only in our apartment.

We probably lost about $1500 in furniture and electronics. Not to mention using holiday time from work to deal with the problem.

It took me 1 month of living at our new place before I was willing to go out and buy a bed, just in case we brought the bugs with us. I even freaked out one day and ripped apart the futon we'd been sleeping on. I didn't find any bugs, but it was destroyed so I had to throw it out.

I'm sorry for anyone that has had to go through this situation.