Do Josh’s basement bugs need to be addressed?
- Yes
- No
- This topic has 13 replies, 12 voices, and was last updated 5 days, 1 hour ago by
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Real talk. I need honest feedback. My normal is defined by living here and speculating what others are comfortable with or experience on their own.
Are critters in my basement a problem? For you?
I’ve always tried to do a shopvac all around the basement before meetings, but I extracted some feedback that made me think I’m not being considerate or “normal”.
If you see a fast moving crawling bug across the floor, does that mean my house is not acceptable or that I need to do more work to rid the house of them?
Is seeing a dead or life spider an unacceptable social norm?
Teach me!
You have the hottest toy of 1992?!?
I’m sad someone killed Fred.
I’m personally fine cohabitating with most bugs, as long as they are not biting me.
I’m personally fine cohabitating with most bugs, as long as they are not biting me.
Agreed. As long as they aren’t poisonous, and don’t bite me or anyone else, I say leave em be
It’s unavoidable to have the occasional creepy crawly anywhere in your house, especially this time of year. But everyone has their own comfort level with bugs. I’m not a nature person for a reason, but I have do have a few “helpers” in the house.
I think it’s very courteous that you clean up for us. It is an unfinished basement, that you’re probably not using every day. Not that you need to do this, but if anything, maybe just remind folks that visiting outside of meetings, it is an unfinished basement and there may be the occasional “resident”.
It’s very thoughtful of you to take our feelings into consideration, but it is your home that you’re kind enough to share with us.
Finished or unfinished, it’s still a basement! It’s considerate of you to reach out and ask, since obviously someone brought it up, but I personally haven’t noticed any real issues in all the years I’ve been coming down there. All of us that own homes have occasional “visitors” (a couple of weeks ago I found a 12″ garden snake in my finished family room!), but that doesn’t mean it’s time to retreat to higher ground or call in the “Bugbusters”!! Thanks again for opening your home to us and providing the LUG with space to store all of our “stuff”!
My serious response echoes the above. While I fully agree that we as a club should do what we can to avoid uncomfortable situations, unless the bugs in question are dangerous (i.e. black widows or something else poisonous), logic would say that as long as reasonable courteous efforts are made to clean the space prior to meetings, that should be sufficient.
After all, the LUG isn’t paying rent to store our inventory in Josh’s personal home – he’s donating the storage space and has done so for 10+ years at this point. If the LUG were a paying customer, perhaps a different standard would be expected – but even then, what “self-storage” locations wouldn’t have a few bugs from time to time?
Without doing any actual accounting for the volume of our inventory, I’d estimate very loosely that we’d need around a 10×10′ storage unit to house the goods. That likely wouldn’t be in a nice, easily-accessed arrangement – it might just be crammed into the storage unit and require labor any time we wanted to get at the various drawers and bins. A very quick search of the nearest self-storage place to me indicates that a 10×10 unit these days runs well over $100/month. So, we’d easily be spending $1000 or significantly more per year to store the goods if not for the donation of Josh’s basement space (or another generous space-donor / other creative ideas for cheap or free storage.)
That’s a financial perspective, in the spirit of the recent thread discussing LUG sustainability with regards to cup credits and reimbursing for expenses related to attending conventions (https://www.steelcitylug.com/forum/topic/convention-policy-for-cup-credits/) – it’s not likely we’d be a viable organization today if we were spending $1000+ / year storing our LUG inventory over the past decade.
[Quick counterpoint to my own point: if we immediately distributed all received parts, rather than storing them indefinitely until redeemed, the storage issue would be limited to “stuff we built and/or equipment use repeatedly at various shows,” such as MILS train track plates, tables, stanchions, sneeze guards, etc., and that would reduce the required storage space and the need for it to be organized in a space where people could peruse bins for parts they need on a regular basis.]
So, to me, Josh has gone above and beyond with the use of his basement over the years, and his willingness to vacuum up any cobwebs, etc. before meetings more than satisfies my personal expectations.
All of that said, if members have phobias, we should do what we can collectively to minimize their exposure to triggers. Similar to the accessibility issue, which we’ve been addressing by hosting meetings (and transporting LUG inventory for redemption) to accessible locations. If reasonable efforts are made to minimize bugs and anyone still has issues being in the basement, perhaps the solution is for those parties to participate in redemption at times when we’re meeting & redeeming at the church near Josh’s house, or at other meetings, thereby avoiding the basement?
[Ben-level post length: Achieved!]
The house centipedes actually eat spiders and spiders eat bugs. Long as they aren’t around much, all good, if they get in the way, they get squashed. Lego spiders sometimes do accidentally too.
I completely agree with @knb112. And I just appreciate you host us and invite us in ~ Thanks for that!
Are bugs now the Q1 build challenge?
I think that sounds like a great idea!
Why clear out free pest control? House centipiedes are completely harmless to people and houses and completely lethal to all the other pests. Good luck catching them anyways. If you see one just poke it and it’ll run to the nearest dark space it can find and go back to work hunting the real pests. Spiders also play their part. Apart from a few notable exceptions (Widows and Brown recluces mainly around here) I let spiders be as long as they stay out of the way. Anything else deserves a quick death and the house centipedes get a chastisement for not doing their jobs 😄
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