Raw Chicken or Your Laundry Area - Which is Scarier?

There is wide agreement that putting any suspect item in the dryer is a good insurance policy against bed bugs as it will kill both bugs and eggs. For weeks, I have been peeling off my "subway" clothes, my "I sat on a park bench clothes", my "I walked past a discarded box spring clothes" and putting them straight into the laundry. By my own self imposed rules I should be putting them right into the dryer, but they are dirty so they need to be washed. I can't put them right into the washer because, news flash to certain unnamed segments of the population, not all items can be washed at the same temperature and mixed with every color. So things sit in the laundry basket a few days. Is it possible that bed bugs eggs are hatching in my laundry basket right now? Is the wayward bug that crawled into the cuff of my pants at the dry cleaner crawling back out and making its way to my bed? These are the questions that prompted the elevation of my laundry area to red alert status.

Red alert status was previously reserved for raw chicken. Everything that touches the raw chicken is considered germy, cutting boards, sponges, the knobs on the sink ect. I wish I had a laundry room but alas this is New York City. I am just thankful that I have laundry at home! So here are some of my rules: clean clothes never go in a basket that had dirty clothing. Laundry does not sit for more than one day. I steam clean my washing machine, around the machine and my dirty clothes basket every few days. After carefully inspecting the dryer's lint trap, I now throw the lint away in a trash that gets emptied daily...because how do I know if my dryer is hot enough? Every so often I begin to wonder whether bed bugs are a right wing conspiracy to keep women at home cleaning, steaming, and doing laundry.