Okay, i've done a full investigation, and have engaged in all-out war with the roaches. I took a few blurry pictures with my cheap-assed digital camera to document the occasion. Hope you all don't mind. :) Perhaps the lens needs cleaning. Anyway, i'm not bucking for a Pulitzer, here, so I don't really care.
Wal-Mart was kind enough to provide me with these weapons of mass destruction. Above, you can see roach bait traps, duct tape, sealing caulk, and boric acid.
I found something that's supposed to be incredibly effective at killing roaches:
boric acid. It's in a fine power form. It gets on their legs when they walk through it, and then they ingest it when they preen themselves (Roaches preen themselves? Who knew?? I mean..they actually have a sense of cleanliness and self-respect?). They also absorb it through their skin. It sucks all the water out of their bodies, dessicating them, and they they
die.
I also found out what their shit looks like: little tiny black dots. If you see this you're supposed to clean it up, because the scent tells other roaches, "Hey, there's all kindsa food in here!"
Last night I moved the microwave to put boric acid under it. I didn't get a picture of it, and you should be glad. That was some nasty shit. Little black dots and roach corpses everywhere. Holy shit. I cleaned that shit up and sprinkled boric acid all over the space. Then I freaked out and started moving everything in the kitchen and cleaning everything. I started seeing little black dots everywhere. Nasty. I cleaned everything I could find. Then I put all the roach bait traps down.
Then I opened the cabinet doors, and I noticed this:
What the fuck? Maybe you can't tell from so far off, but that hole is way too big for that wire. I mean.. who designs kitchens this way? Do the engineers want any bug to be able to run all over my dishes?
Then, I bent down and looked under my kitchen sink:
In all, there were 5 humongous holes under the kitchen sink where pipes went through. There were also equally huge holes under my bathroom sink. Between the kitchen and the bathroom, there were probably 10 holes in all. I'm only showing pictures of a few of them here for brevity's sake.
Okay, i'm no engineer. I'm not even good at fixing things around the house. But I think that whoever designed this building needs to be slapped hard in the face. Look how big those holes are!! Do they not feel the need to seal them up? No wonder roaches are getting in! Hell, I might as well just leave my door open all the time. I guess it's these kinds of things that make me only have to pay $275 a month in rent. So, I sealed all those holes up as best I could with duct tape.
This morning, my wife woke up to find that the little buggers were now getting into the house through the drain in the sink. These are some determined fucking bugs. How they're getting into the pipes, I don't know. I guess they're coming in from another apartment's sink drain. Either that, or there's a leak somewhere. Or, my wife was wrong, and it only looked like they were coming in through the drain. If she's wrong, then there's another hole somewhere that I must find.
The bathtub facet has started constantly dripping water. That's supposed to be bad, because one drop of water can feed them for a really long time. So, i'm getting the landlord to fix that. After he does that, I'm going to re-caulk the entire bathtub. All the previous caulking is all falling apart, and some of the wood is rotted in the corners. They're not going to get in that way, either.
Anyway, I hope this isn't too boring. It's my own personal war, so I felt like posting it. :)