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part of The Well Cultured Anonymous
Contents |
First things first
You must be able to answer yes to all of the following before you can live on your own.
Do you have a source of income suitable to live on your own? Do you know how to clean up after yourself and do laundry? Do you own enough furniture to not look completely poor? Are you of the legal age to live on your own?
If you passed, congratulations, nobody else gives a fuck.
Getting Ready
You should also call up the local companies that take care of utilities and get an estimate on your total deposits for them. Once you've got that, get a phone book, and look in the yellow pages for apartments. Call up every place and ask them how much the apartment size you're looking for costs, then go around to the ones you're interested in and see which ones look like shit and which ones are decent enough to live in. Keep in mind that while you may not mind living in a shitty place, you won't get laid nearly as much, and you may get your stuff stolen. Once you've found a suitable place you can afford, find the people in charge and take care of business. Be sure to ask if the water heater and stove use gas or electric, since that may or may not be another bill you'll have to pay. You should call up the utilities companies shortly after this and get everything set up, like electricity, cable, and internet. You may also want a phone line, but it's generally better to just get a cell phone.
When you're checking out the apartment always make sure to check behind everything, my place looked so clean it was sparkling when I first moved in but when I looked under my bed the for the first time... Lets just say I was less than pleasantly surprised.
Another thing you should always ask is to see if there are rat, insects, homeless people, etc. infestations in the house. Trust me, there are many people who sell apartments and leave the 1000s of cockroaches living in their walls a secret. On the topic of insects, if the apartment has a tiny hole that may seem harmless, it's not. Keep an eye for these holes and ask the landlord to do something about them. Cockroaches and other small insects do indeed live in them and yes, they will fucking bother you.
Another thing homeowners don't tell you is the age of the house, the type of paint the house uses, etc. I would ask to see the deed of the house before going ahead and renting it. A friend of mine had some serious health problems because his house was old, and still used lead paint. Note: Many City Halls make the deeds public (Well, at least the one I work at anyways)
Moving In
This part's fairly straightforward. You shouldn't move in without your utilities turned on. If you have a bunch of stuff that won't fit into your vehicle or the vehicle of anybody willing to help you move, you'll need to rent one, or hire a neighbor. Just take all your shit from your old place to your new place, it's not hard. Try not to bang up walls while moving, since you're on your own now, and damages come out of your pocket. You may also want to check to make sure the windows are all locked, since the last 2 apartments I've moved into had them unlocked and I didn't notice for a week.
Living
You will almost always have a landlord, remember that it is his job to make sure the water isn't brown and that the boiler is working. If you have a problem, call him instead of trying to fix it on your own unless you are 100% sure that you can fix it on your own easily and ask someone else about this first, if you end up making it worse you're liable to be billed and you will piss off your landlord by making him work for an hour on something that would have taken five minutes to fix. On the subject of landlord, pay your fucking rent on time dumbass! If you miss rent for as much as one month and your landlord, or alternatively the person who owns the building if he hires a landlord, doesn't like you it will be that much harder to get apartements in the future because of shit credentials.
Make sure you buy the expensive cleaning products, you do not want your bathroom or your clothes smelling like shit for a month because you were too cheap to spend a little extra. And on that note, don't be a dipshit and postpone cleaning, when you get an unexpected visit from the hot girl next door you do not want your floor to be littered with old trash nor do you want your toilet to smell like shit and be covered in it. Just make sure you throw shit away instead of dropping it on the floor, go over your floor with a hoover once a week or so and for the love of God change the fucking sheets as often as possible. Under and behind things is not as important, but shit will start stacking up back there before long so try to at least stick the hoover back there once a month to keep new kinds of E. coli from breeding.
When it comes to hosting parties in your new fancy pad, don't. You will either get too drunk and wake up to a completely destroyed apartment and be in debt for years for repairs and will have to spend weeks cleaning to even make it look decent, or you will be a complete bore running around making sure people put their beers on coasters and don't play with your prized vase and as such attract the scorn of basically every person in the area you live. It's a shitload of work, so just leave it to the professionals or at least people who are dumber than you to do it.