8 Tips To Avoid co*ckroach Infestations If You Live In An Apartment (2024)

Apartment life attracts all sorts, and that means that there are a lot of people around you who are doing lots of different things like building collections or coming home from a long night working in a restaurant. Often, it’s not that “dirty” people draw roaches, but that they’re easy to transport from place to place. The pests can even be relocated from prior housing or storage facilities where boxes might have been kept.

Many times, roaches are brought in in old boxes or old books, as these are very popular, mobile places for them to lay their egg cases. They can also be tracked in from places where there’s a lot of food that can draw roaches from outside, like a restaurant. Again, those egg cases are pretty indestructible.

Keeping roaches out of your apartment can be a harder job than it might seem initially. The goal, ultimately, is to make your apartment very unfriendly to any roaches that might be nearby. That means depriving them of sources of food, water and shelter. Here are some tips for doing that:

Always Clean Up Meals Immediately

Leaving food out on the stove is one of the most innocuous things that people do that also happens to benefit roaches. So as soon as you’re done with a meal, clean up any food, scrape all your plates and make sure that dishes are either washed or placed in a dishwasher immediately. Roaches are fast, and even if you don’t see them, they may pop by to eat a quick bite while you’re in the other room watching TV.

Keep a Mat Outside Your Door

If you work in food service or have friends who do, it’s important to make sure that you’re not tracking roach eggs in on your shoes. Keep a heavy duty, rough welcome mat outside that guests can wipe their shoes on, or better yet, make sure they take their shoes off before coming into your apartment. It may seem extreme, but if your friends have ever had roach issues, they’ll understand.

Practice Minimalism

It can be easy to acquire a lot of stuff and need to stash it in every corner and closet, but this practice also leaves a lot of hiding places for roaches. You definitely want to see them sooner rather than later, so while you’re living the apartment life, do yourself a favor and be very mindful of what you bring in to your home. The less you have to store, the fewer places roaches can hide from you and multiply.

Clean Regularly

Cleaning may be the least fun thing you can do on your time off, but it’s important if you want to help keep ahead of roaches. Although they love human food, they also will happily consume pet food, and even non-food items like wallpaper paste and book glue. Cleaning regularly will help you monitor for signs of roaches and make the whole place a lot less friendly to them, since they won’t have any forgotten corners to camp out in.

Once you’ve got a roach infestation in your apartment, it can be very difficult to get rid of it. This is, in part, because they can go between units and snack on whatever’s around, but also because it’s harder to find them all in an apartment complex. You might kill a bunch in your unit only to discover your neighbor next door has dozens. However, if you do these things, it’ll certainly help keep the numbers down:

Make It Hard for Roaches to Survive

Roaches need a steady supply of food and water to survive and reproduce, so your goal is to break that cycle as much as you can in your own unit. That means always cleaning up dishes and meals immediately, keeping pet food put away except when feeding your pet and checking your unit for water leaks in places like under the kitchen and bathroom sink.

Tidy Up the Place

It’s not a given that an apartment with a roach infestation is also in need of a deep cleaning, but a deep cleaning never hurts in these situations. A very clean apartment is one that’s easy to treat for roaches, so doing this first and hoping that it takes care of the problem can kill two birds with one stone. You also may find where the roaches are coming from or hiding while you clean, allowing you to seal that opening.

Place Roach Bait Stations

Spraying for roaches helps to kill the insects where they are, but feeding roaches a steady stream of bait is helpful too. They don’t die immediately, but the slower action of the bait will keep roaches from avoiding the area, since they don’t make the connection between the dead roaches and the bait stations. Replace the baits regularly, and monitor with sticky traps until you notice there aren’t any more roaches.

Call Your Apartment Manager

The odds are good that if there’s a roach infestation in your apartment, then there are infestations in other units in the building. Roaches don’t care which unit they’re infesting, so they just tend to wander until they find snacks. Call your apartment manager and make them aware of the situation so they can help you and the other tenants eliminate the issue with professional extermination.

There are many unique problems that only apartment dwellers face, and although roach infestations are kind of an everybody problem, the way these insects move through apartment buildings is not the same as how they move through single family homes. It can take time to eliminate roaches completely in apartments, especially if your neighbors are not as on board with the extra work as you are.

But, if you work with your apartment manager, do all you can to avoid adding to the problem and keep your apartment a food desert for co*ckroaches, you’ll soon notice their numbers dwindling. Getting a cat won’t hurt, either, as they are often very aggressive insect hunters.