Arrrrh! Pests and bugs in our rental!

We have been living in our current rental house for 2 and a half years. During this time we have not had the house professionally bug sprayed.

We are having a bug problem at the moment with some massive ****roaches and other beetles and spiders. I do keep the house quite clean so they are not in the house because its dirty.
I have put down ****roach baits and got one of those mortein indoor 3month bug killer sprays and went and did all the skirting boards, window frames and doors (I did this about 6 weeks ago), however we are still getting them (and I mean absolutely massive ****roaches).

Do the owners have to pay for the house to be professionally sprayed or is that up to us to do? I dont know what else to do to get rid of them. I feel like under the house needs to be done as well as the outside of the house as I see them outside. I have also seen mouse droppings under the sink in the kitchen and back in Winter time, I thought I heard possums or something in the roof.

I dont even know how much it costs to get a big 3 bedroom house sprayed.

Maybe if anyone else has any other solutions that work, they can let me know.

It makes me want to move but we are paying such good rent considering how expensive rentals are these days and how hard they are to get, that getting the problem fixed would be better.

Thank you in advance.

I would be asking the owners hun

how awful :(

im home owner so i cant comment on the renter thing , but i use the insect bombs under neath my home , and find i get about 6 months out of it .

Thanks Mabello and Little Miss Chez.

I might get DP to venture under the house and put the bombs under there.

To be honest hon, there's not too much more you can do. The big roaches are bush roaches - they're roamers and don't tend to infest (as the small roaches do). They are highly prevalent in Sydney anyway (especially the inner suburbs), and wander in to houses looking for food. And usually go elsewhere if they find nothing. Surface sprays and bombs will deter them, but are less effective because they are transient anyway.

They are generally more active in warmer weather, so this time of year they are everywhere. The only solution is not having any access points for them, which is hard in a rental. Screens on doors and windows, and making sure that skirtings are sealed will help.

As for the spiders, are they huntsman spiders? If you have any large trees close to the house which can be trimmed back, this may help to stop them from coming inside.

Good luck!

Im in a rental and im pretty sure you have to pay for pest control yourself, you can call your agents and ask, we are lucky and have good agents that manage to get owners to fix everything within 24 hrs of reporting it and are willing to go halves in an air con, maybe u can ask if owners will go halves in pest control? I think its a hundred or two for a normal sized house, lasts way longer than anything you can buy at supermarket/bunnings too.

We get the huge ****roaches too over here in Perth, they are gross but luckily they are not after food unlike the small black ones and tend to be loners and not infest.

We found some good spray at supermarket, its mortein lure n kill surface spray, it smells like orange which is slightly better than that horrible fly spray smell, it does lure the ****roaches but its very potent and we find them dead within 30cm of walking over where we've sprayed. So that could be a quick fix for a while, good luck!

mmm we have a house in Brissy and we had it sprayed the week we moved, but some severe weather in November brought a huge wave of fleas, which we never had issues with while living in there. As I know already that fleas can lay dormant for 12 months so we had to get someone out again to treat it for fleas. We were contacted by the agency to tell us it needed to be done and we said fine.

I think there is a plague of insects in Sydney atm! I have ants everywhere in my kitchen. I put out ant rid every day and then they go but are back in a day. We had fleas and DH put bombs under the house cause he said there were millions of them in the dirt under there cause the previous owners appeared to have had a dog under the house ay some point.
Be careful with all this insect killing spray when you are pg.

mrs mac we are having the same problem! ants, silverfish and a few roaches.

I dont like to spray with chemicals, we are a chemical freee house! and its hard being in a unit, you never know how dirty next door is.....

It might be worth talking to your agent about. They may well say the owners will pay to have it done for you. Professional spraying should help a lot with your insect pests, but as others have said it can be exey.
I have to admit, spiders don't bother me a great deal - we get heaps of little ones around the place and I kind of like them because they eat the smaller, bitey insects ;) I wish they would catch some of our moths that we have around the joint atm though.
Not much you can do about possums (even trapping and re-location doesn't work because you can't take them too far away so they just end up coming back again), and IME mice are extremely difficult to get rid of, particularly if you have lots of vegetation around your home. If the carpet is old and a bit yucko then that will attract the mice, so it could be worth asking for new carpet.
ETA: The ants - we have been getting these tiny ones lately - you can hardly see them but they are attracted even if I put a knife in the sink still with some butter on from my toast! I have never seen them in Syd before. My sister had them up in Cairns but they seem to have found their way into my kitchen!

Thanks so much for the info girls. Mrs Mac, I think you are right about the insect plague at the moment!
We have floor boards (no carpets) which is great as we dont have the flea problem and even though we have 2 dogs, neither have had a flea in about a year and a half. I am always checking them.
Tattoomama- thanks for the heads up on the spray that doesnt stink like fly spray. I might make a trip to the supermarket today.
Snacks- I will give the landlords a call today. Unfortunately they property manage themselves so I always feel awkward about asking stuff to be done as I have to do it directly. thanks for your advice.

depends on what is stated in your rental agreement

when I rented out my place the pest control was done so the tenant didn't have to do it

the house Dh and I were living in, it was our responsiblity to get it professionally pest treated when we moved out - this was stated in the lease

Yeah, I think I'd find that awkward too! But still, it is worth mentioning, even if you inwardly acknowledge that you may need to pay for it yourself.
We were going to buy a new arial for our place recently and mentioned it to the agent (we intended to pay for it ourselves - just wanted to upgrade) but she said she'd talk to the owners and they did agree to pay... And it got done really quickly too! So it is always worth asking, I reckon :)
GL!!!