Moving House Without Bringing the Pests Along: A Box-by-Box Protocol for Autumn 2026

There is one season that pest control technicians know inside out and that customers never see coming: the second half of September. Not because pests suddenly multiply — but because hundreds of thousands of households across the Paris region have just moved every single one of their belongings from one home to another in the space of a few days.

From the point of view of a bed bug or a German cockroach, a house move is free transport to a brand-new habitat, free of competitors, with an occupant who takes three weeks to work out what is going on. Every year, between late September and mid-November, we receive a wave of calls whose opening line is almost always the same: "We moved in at the beginning of September, everything was fine, and now we're waking up covered in bites."

In nearly all of these cases, the infestation was not found on site. It was brought in. This article explains how — and above all, how to avoid it: before, during and after the van arrives.

Close-up of a brown cockroach with long antennae resting on a green leaf in dim light

Why a house move is the perfect transmission route

Three species, three different ways of travelling

Bed bugs get all the attention, but they are only part of the problem. Three families of pests take advantage of a move, and each one uses a distinct route.

The bed bug is the most discreet: an adult can survive several months without a blood meal, which means a piece of furniture stored in a cellar all summer remains perfectly capable of spreading an infestation. In its work on bed bugs, France's ANSES agency notes that passive dissemination — via objects and furniture — remains the main mode of spread in densely populated urban areas.

The German cockroach, for its part, loves corrugated cardboard: the fluting offers a dark shelter at just the right humidity and temperature. A box picked up behind a supermarket or in a bin store is statistically one of the riskiest objects you can bring into your home.

The weak link: interim storage

Few moves happen in a single day. Between departure and arrival there is almost always:

• a cellar or shared storage unit where boxes sit for a few days;
• a communal self-storage unit, where your belongings rub shoulders with strangers';
• a shared or rented van, used by someone else the day before;
• storage at your parents' or a friend's place, whose pest history you know nothing about.

Each of these links is a point of cross-contamination. A self-storage unit is not airtight: partitions are often made of mesh or slatted panels, and nothing stops a bed bug from covering the two metres between your sofa and your neighbour's.

Simple rule: the more time your load spends sitting still in a shared space, the stricter your packing protocol must be. A direct A → B move on the same day is infinitely less risky than three weeks in storage.

Before: the sorting stage that decides everything

What should never go in the van

A house move is the only moment in your life when you individually handle every object you own. It is an inspection opportunity that won't come round again for several years. Don't waste it.

Three categories deserve a firm decision:

1. Ageing sleeping furniture. A fabric-covered divan base more than ten years old, a convertible sofa bed, an upholstered headboard: these are the three items that harbour the most bed bugs in the cases we handle. If the piece is nearing the end of its life, the move is the right moment to let it go. Moving a suspect bed base costs more in the long run than buying a new one.
2. Boxes of textiles never reopened. Boxes of winter clothes stored for two or three years are the classic moth nest. They must be opened, inspected, washed or frozen — not transported sealed.
3. Second-hand small appliances. Toasters, microwaves, coffee makers: these are prime shelters for cockroach egg cases. They travel from flat to flat in student house-shares and spread infestations with depressing regularity.

Packing with the right materials

Salvaged corrugated cardboard should be ruled out entirely. It is not only a potential shelter: it is also impossible to inspect once filled and taped shut.

Two alternatives work well:

• brand-new moving boxes, bought flat and assembled at packing time, never stored open in a cellar;
• stackable airtight plastic crates — smooth, transparent, washable, with no fluting at all. They are reusable and well suited to prolonged storage.

For mattresses and bed bases — the two most critical items — the protocol is different. They must be wrapped in a certified zip-fastened, fine-mesh bed bug mattress encasement, fitted before leaving the old home and removed only once the item is installed in the new bedroom. A thin plastic moving cover is not enough: it tears on the first door frame, and a bed bug will slip through a two-millimetre rip.

For bedding, curtains and clothes, the logic is as follows: anything that can go through a 60 °C wash or a hot tumble-dryer cycle for 30 minutes is treated. Anything that can't take it (wool, cashmere, silk) goes into a large freezer bag and into the freezer at −18 °C for a minimum of 72 hours. This is the recognised protocol for destroying every life stage, eggs included.

Air, wash, dry: the winning sequence

Order matters. Wash, tumble-dry hot, then bag immediately in sealed plastic bags. A textile that has been washed and then laid back on a potentially infested bed is a textile you'll have to wash again. This is the most common mistake, and the most costly in time.

Get some vacuum storage bags for duvets and pillows: they cut down the volume, seal completely, and keep clean items isolated until unpacking.

During: the van, the stairwell, the landing

The van is never neutral

A rental van was in use the day before, often for another house move. A quick vacuum of the floor and corners before loading costs nothing. If you're using a removal company, it is perfectly reasonable to ask what their cleaning procedure is between jobs — serious firms have an answer.

Never set mattresses, sofas or open boxes down directly on the floor of a stairwell, a bin store or the pavement: these are transit zones where bed bugs move about actively when a building is infested. A few minutes is all it takes.

The buffer zone: one sacrificial room

This is the single most effective measure in the protocol, and it costs nothing.

Designate one single unloading room in the new home — ideally the entrance hall, a corridor or a tiled room, never the bedroom. Everything arrives there. Nothing crosses that line without being opened, inspected and emptied.

In practice:

• put the boxes down on tarpaulins or light-coloured sheets laid on the floor: black specks and insects are immediately visible against a white background;
• open each box in that room, take out the contents, put them straight into their final place;
• get the empty box out of the building immediately — not into the cellar, not into the storage cupboard;
• vacuum the unloading area at the end of the day, and throw the bag out.

This one rule — a box never spends the night in the home — eliminates a large share of the risk on its own.

Home kitchen with mint-green walls, worktop, fridge, cooker and wooden flooring

After: the three weeks that count

Inspect the new home before you occupy it

Ideally, the inspection takes place at key handover, with the property empty. That is the only moment when everything is visible.

Things to check, torch in hand:

• loose skirting boards and cracks in the floorboards of the future bedroom;
• the back and underside of electrical sockets and switches;
• the service ducts in the kitchen and bathroom, under the sink;
• the hinges and edges of kitchen units left behind by the previous occupant;
• conduits and unsealed pipe runs.

A powerful LED torch used at a grazing angle reveals traces that a ceiling light will never show: droppings, shed skins, egg shells. Seal up everything you can with filler or steel wool before installing the furniture — afterwards it will be ten times harder.

Set out monitors, not insecticides

The temptation when moving in is to "treat preventively". That's a mistake, for two reasons: preventive insecticide use selects for resistance, and it gives you no information at all.

What does give you information are pheromone detection traps or passive sticky traps, placed:

• under the bed legs and behind the headboard (bed bugs);
• behind the fridge, under the sink, in the corners of the worktop (cockroaches);
• in the wardrobe and textile drawers (moths).

Check them at day 7, day 14 and day 30. An empty trap after a month is genuinely reassuring information. A trap with a catch is an early warning, at a stage where the response is still simple and localised.

It is worth repeating what ANSES has stressed on several occasions: foggers and "shock" aerosol products sold for domestic use disperse cockroach and bed bug populations instead of eliminating them, and create an exposure risk for occupants. The agency's website, like the fact sheets from Santé publique France, is clear on this point.

What the law says if the infestation was already there

If the infestation is discovered in the first few days and you are a tenant, the question of decent housing arises. The French law of 6 July 1989, as amended by the ELAN Act, requires landlords to provide accommodation "free from any infestation of pest and parasitic species". In practice, this means:

• reporting it by recorded delivery letter with acknowledgement of receipt as soon as possible;
• documenting it with time-stamped photos and, if possible, a bailiff's report or a pest control company report;
• contacting the local council's public hygiene and health service (SCHS) if there is no response.

The sooner you report it after moving in, the harder it is to pin the origin on you. That is also why an inspection at key handover has legal value, not just health value.

The condensed timeline for a pest-free move

Key takeaways

A house move doesn't create an infestation: it relocates one. The difference between a stress-free move-in and a pest control file requiring three visits comes down to actions that, added together, amount to about half a day's extra work.

The decisive trio fits into three sentences: don't move a suspect bed, don't use salvaged cardboard, a box never spends the night in the new home.

And if, despite everything, doubt creeps in over the following weeks — three bites in a line when you wake up, a cockroach spotted in the kitchen at night, a clean hole in a wool jumper — the right response is neither panic nor buying an aerosol. It's a proper diagnosis, carried out quickly, while the population is still confined to one room. At that stage, a single treatment is nearly always enough. Three months later, it will take three.