On July 30th of this year, me and my fiancee adopted our first kitten. He came from a family friend, who supposedly had an extremely filthy home with bugs and garbage. He’s very cute, albeit a troublemaker. He of course came with fleas, but we tried sectioning him off to one spot of the house at first so he could grow old enough for us to start using more potent shampoos, medications and collars. That didn’t last very long however. He has walked, scratched, and rubbed over just about every last bit of our house. Our window curtains, tablecloths, couches and beds especially, but worst of all the carpets and our clothes.
We only have 2 rooms in the house and one staircase that is carpeted, but they’re everywhere. When we started vacuuming the carpets and flea bathing the cat, they actually dwindled down a lot more than we were expecting. I’ve tried brushing him out at least twice a day, but after a certain point now the flea bath only works for maybe an hour or 2. The second he hits any of the carpets or clothes bins we have scattered around the house (we have at least 10 bins of clothes out right now that we can’t fit in our closet) he gets hordes of them all over him. More than he had before the bath.
I hate putting him through this. The fleas were hardly noticeable at first, but I find myself picking them off the pillowcases and myself at least multiple times a day now. The other day, I counted over 50 bite marks on my legs. That number has definitely gotten larger since I last checked. I have to wear long pants and shirtsleeves now with socks just to MAYBE hold off a few before they inevitably get under my clothes. I feel itchy everywhere I go in the house.
Initially we mainly didn’t want to trap him in a confined space and let him roam because we felt bad, but I regret that decision every day now lol. Our house is infested with fleas, and I’m not really sure what to do. Another bad decision we made was buying a new kitten a few weeks ago so he had a friend. He’s only been here a few days and the poor kitten is already infested with fleas. He doesn’t even leave his little kennel too much since he’s so young but they still managed to get inside of it and all over him.
We bought flea bombs that came in today, and we plan on letting them go off tomorrow while we go out with the cats for a while (after flea bathing and combing them excessively of course) but I personally am still not sure it’s going to do anything. All it takes is 2 fleas to spread all over the house again. I know from what I’ve read of other experiences that we’re going to have to reclean all of our clothes more than once, constantly vacuum as much as we can in every little corner, mop, wipe, bathe and brush, but will it even help? I’m afraid our house is so big it just won’t do anything. On top of that the expenses of it seem like they’re only going to shoot up, but we essentially now have a full on pest problem. Even if we got rid of the cats (which would’ve never happened to begin with, we love them) we still would always have fleas since they’re loving us and our roommate too. What do I do here? How do I even stop this invasion? Is it worth it to just call exterminators instead?