Oh My Goddess, yes, it has certainly not been a minor nuisance to us. We moved from rural southern Ontario to a city 3 months ago and within days my kids were covered in bites, especially the little one who had quite the swelling reaction and extreme itch. She'd wake itching, bleeding, crying, and wake the rest of the house and presumably the neighbours up and downstairs. It was horrible. 2 weeks after moving in we found out the fellow downstairs who moved out the same day we got here left behind an apartment full of fleas. The property manager and superintendents went in to inspect the place and ran outside and STRIPPED ON THE LAWN, they were that covered in fleas. One of them told me she looked down at her sandal clad feet and it looked like she was wearing fuzzy black socks. The fumigator who came said he'd never seen anything like it, he wore a has-mat type suit when he treated the place. Needless to say, I packed everything up, steam cleaned all the floors, rads and window frames, and had the exterminator spray our place, the balcony, the fire escape, and the shared hall/stairwell. We left for 4 days, when we came back I carefully vacuumed, laundered absolutely everything, and cleaned everything else as I re-unpacked it. We've now gone through that process twice more along with vacuuming several times per week with a strong flea collar in the vacuum canister. I wash every piece of fabric in the house weekly, I've purchased special mattress covers, new pillows and covers, new duvets and covers, ditched box springs in favour of solid fabric free bed frames, put door mats outside all the doors covered in DE and have lately taken to spraying with flea poison on those and around the door frames as well. I also have been misting the floors, walls, baseboards, bed frames, rads, shoe mats, etc with essential oils thought to deter insects. And I've steam cleaned the floors again too, also every crack in this place has been caulked up tight. The building is kept at 25C and is super extra plus dry. I have flea traps in every room, dishes of soapy water under nightlights. We don't have a pet or any carpets, it's all hardwood and tiles here. I don't keep clutter and am a very neat housekeeper.
It's cold out now, snow on the ground, the flea traps have caught next to nothing the past two weeks and still, my daughter gets home from school, sits on the floor to play and colour (I can't get her to stay at the table, she's too short for it to be comfortable) and by the time I put her to bed she's got more bites. I've had our place inspected, mattresses, floors, everywhere, for bedbugs just to be sure that's not it and it isn't. It's fleas. A horrible, unshakeable case of fleas. The building manager refuses to treat the building as a whole and spray it all at once and everybody else here has pets they treat with advantage. I'm about to go that route myself, foster a cat as a flea sponge and poison it to poison the fleas. How horrible is that? But I just don't know what else to do, this is literally eating up my entire life, all my time and a great deal of money, not to mention my daughter's health. She's been treated with antibiotics for a horribly infected bite, she's suffered so much, and she's regressing to the point I have to sleep with her. I moved to the city to work, lol, to save money for a better life. Instead I'm in debt for the first time in years.
No, not a minor nuisance at all.
. I also do a lice check on both kids daily and spray them with tea tree oil before they go to school (aka the germ and lice factory, omg). We never have fleas on us, not unless one jumps on then jumps off. I don't think they really hang around on the body. They just sense her heat when she's sitting on the floor and hop on over and bite her up.
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. In the rest of my sets there are a couple of quilts and a LOT of toys made from old clothes too.