Roaches In Closet 

Did you know that living in a home with cockroaches increases your risk of having poor mental health? The sight of a cockroach scampering across your favorite outfit is more than just a stressful experience.

Roaches in your closet can expose you to potentially dangerous germs and ruin your clothing. Knowing how to eliminate them helps you win this common wardrobe challenge.

Why Are There Roaches In My Closet?

You’ll first want to take a deep breath and remember that discovering a few cockroaches in your closet doesn’t mean that your house is dirty or that you’re unhygienic. Roaches visit closets for the same reasons that they go elsewhere in your house.

Closets provide roaches a place to hide as they rest or build their nests. There is a possibility that a roach has migrated from another room in your home that exists nearby, such as the kitchen or bathroom.

Or, you might’ve accidentally brought roaches or their eggs into your closet after you bought infested clothes without you knowing.

Roaches sometimes lay their egg cases in clothing, which then gets transferred from storage in a warehouse or a secondhand shop to the consumer’s home. You could even get roaches in your closet if they hide in clothes that were stored in boxes in your garage or basement.

Once a roach gets to your closet, it’ll choose to stay there for several reasons. First, roaches often burrow into piles of clothing to stay warm and safe from predators.

Second, the roaches might view your favorite clothing as a suitable food source. Even when you clean your clothes, perspiration oils, skin flakes, and other types of residue can exist on the fibers, which is attractive to certain species of cockroaches.

There is also the possibility you have clothing in your closet that you don’t wash after every single wear, such as a jacket. Even a drop of food or drink on these clothes could bring roaches running for dinner.

Finally, there’s a chance that there could be moisture in your closet that roaches use to stay hydrated. If roaches are in a closet that you don’t use often, there could be a water leak in a back corner that brings roaches into it after a rainstorm.

Basement closets are regularly invaded by roaches who discover most areas near a leak.

What Are the Signs of Roaches In Your Closet?

The most obvious sign is finding a roach running around in the closet, but a few more subtle clues can let you know how extensive the infestation might be in this room. After finding a roach, keep an eye out for these signs that it is time to do a major closet cleanup.

Discovering Droppings or Smudges

If this is your first time finding roaches in your house, then you may not know what roach droppings look like. Unlike other types of insect poop, roach droppings can be kind of runny.

The amount of grease and bacteria roaches consume in their normal diet makes them look more like smears than pebbles.

You can find cockroach droppings anywhere in a closet, but you might want to carefully check the seam between the walls and the floor, along with the corners of your closet. Roaches often leave their droppings in places where they hang out for longer periods.

Running Across an Egg Case

Female roaches create egg cases that they’ll leave behind in places where they believe the newly hatched babies will be able to find food. A roach egg case is usually around one-quarter of an inch long, and it is usually a brownish-red color.

Since egg cases can hold anywhere from 10 to 50 eggs, you’ll want to remove and destroy any that you find immediately. To remove a roach egg, you can simply place it in a sealed plastic bag and throw it away somewhere that is located off of your property.

Seeing Holes In Your Clothes

Finding holes in your shirt or other clothing signifies that something might be eating it. However, roaches don’t leave a special type of hole as they feed. Several types of closet bugs will chew holes in your clothing, and you could be dealing with moths, carpet beetles, or even crickets.

If you aren’t sure if a roach ate a hole in your clothes, then you’ll need a pest professional to check it out. There’s a strong possibility that you could treat the wrong type of insect. Or, you could have multiple bugs hanging out in your closet.

How to Get Rid of Roaches In Closets?

After you’ve had time to take a deep breath, you want to clear your schedule. Getting rid of roaches in your closet will require some work, but you can try to look on the bright side.

This might be the motivation you need to do some decluttering, and you might even rediscover a favorite outfit hiding beneath those clothing piles.

If your closet is cluttered, removing piles of clothing and storage boxes gives the pest technician more room to inspect thoroughly before recommending the best treatment.

The most effective and fastest way to get rid of roaches in your closet is to arrange for spraying. Applying certain pesticides around the perimeter of your closet and other rooms in your house will eliminate any living roaches.

Residual sprays also kill off new roaches as they hatch from their eggs. As for your clothing, you don’t have to treat each one of your shirts. Instead, you can wash your clothes after the spraying to remove any leftover bacteria, droppings, or egg cases the roaches left behind.

Remember that you will want to carefully check any storage boxes in your closet for roaches and their eggs. Plastic storage boxes are great for storing your clothes since you can easily wash them with soap and water to remove any roach residue.

Keeping Roaches Out of Closets?

Maintaining a roach-free closet gives you peace of mind, and everyone deserves to know that they won’t have to worry about an undetected bug running out of a pocket at the worst possible time.

When you arrange for professional spraying, take a moment to ensure that the chemicals the technician uses have residual effects. This helps to quickly reduce the risk of an infestation growing if even a single roach gets into your home.

You might also need to shore up any potential entry points around your house. Re-sealing a window in your bedroom or closet could help to stop roaches from crawling inside. As a final note, make sure to check any items that you bring to your closet carefully.

Inspecting the clothing and other items you buy and store in your closet can save you from having to do an unexpected closet clean-out and pest removal project again.