We've started renovating a space in my parent's basement to live in so we can help out around the house/land. The lease here isn't up till January, but I wanna get that shit done. It's been stressing me the fuck out. I ended up mocking up the floor plan and our furniture in CAD so we could get a feel for how the downsizing cookie is gonna crumble. It is gonna be a quarter the space of our current place, but conquering bedbugs a while back made a lot of downsizing decisions for us. Spending a lot of time staring at the layout puzzling out walk paths and public / private spaces. The owners before my parents used the space to run a business, so it is more or less independent of the rest of the house. Figuring out how to get multiple uses of a space is an interesting challenge, but not really one I'm passionate about. Feels more like work.
Yikes. Bedbugs are bad news. I once slept in a "hotel" in SF that was littered with them. I went and got trash bags and covered everything I touched with plastic. With some careful quarantine procedures, I miraculously didn't bring any back. If you haven't already tried: bedbugs don't handle heat too well (eggs neither). They are weaker than pets and babies. You could stuff all your possessions into a car, seal it up, and park it in the summer sun somewhere for an afternoon to be rid of them. The ones in the car at least.
Alas, we've already had our entire unit heat treated once and sprayed twice. The exterminator that did it offers a 6 month "guarantee" so the subsequent callbacks have been free but he hasn't exactly been confidence inspiring to deal with. Our lease has a clause where the tenant is responsible for paying for treatment. And the guy they called out was more than a month's rent. So I wouldn't be too surprised if someone else in the building had them and was staying mum about it. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯