Bed Bugs and other Blessings

This summer, Tim and I moved into a small apartment. We were planning to stay there for a year or more. In order to move in late in the Spring we took over someone's lease and had to go without professional cleaning during the changeover. We did manage to score some of the previous tenant's furniture though!

It was a little weird sleeping on someone else's old mattress but we didn't have the money to buy a new one at the time. She also left us a futon, a super cute dining table and chairs, a microwave, a mirror, and a tv stand! It was perfect for setting up our first apartment especially since we did not have extra money to furnish our new home.

Since we took over the lease but wanted professional cleaning to be done at some point, we would have been required to move out for three weeks in August and move in to a different apartment in the same complex at the end of the month. So we made plans to visit family and friends and to move our belongings into a storage unit.

Towards the end of July, we noticed the apartment had been very humid for a while. I thought the weather was the reason for the constant moisture. But it seemed strange that even after airing out the apartment for days without rain the air was still thick and wet.

Also, we began to find suspicious red spots on our bed sheets... this made me especially afraid because I had also seen a lot of little red bumps on my wrist recently. I did some research and talked it over with Tim and decided there were bed bugs.

I suspect they didn't show up sooner because we bought a new mattress cover that kept them from getting to us for a while. Also, I was in the middle of a struggle to repel ants and spiders from our bedroom. The spiders were eating the ants and leaving the bodies lying around. Maybe they would have eaten the bed bugs too!

It was Thursday when we determined the awful truth about the tiny bugs. We then took the old mattress, box spring, and ancient metal frame out to the dumpster. That was also the day we realized the reason for the humid air. It had rained a lot. Due to the age and lack of upkeep of the building, rainwater came in and stayed under the carpet causing mold to grow. It wasn't wet enough for us to get our feet wet when walking on the carpet but we did notice the carpet getting gradually more lumpy. The biggest clue was the mold growing up the wall where the bed used to be.

On Friday we looked into other apartments available for immediate move in. On Saturday we signed a lease and began to move all of our things to the new apartment. By the end of the next week someone agreed to take over our lease at the old place. We made sure he was aware of the problems we discovered!

No bed bugs followed us to our new home! We did a thorough cleaning of everything!

The reason we consider this whole thing a series of blessings is that God graciously replaced many bad things with good things and grew us in faith and trust and closer to Him in the process!

We lost our bed, but we had a futon to sleep on. We needed to move suddenly, but we found a great apartment right away and didn't have to keep things in storage at all. We had bed bugs, but we didn't feel obligated to keep that old bed any longer! Our "garden style" apartment took in water and grew mold, but our new place is above ground and well-maintained!

This is just a summary; there were other issues with our old apartment. Now God has improved our living situation in major ways just because he loves us.

::Psalm 30.11-12::

You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord my God, I will praise you forever.