What to buy for a first apartment, and what can wait

An essentials list sorted by phase and by have, borrow, secondhand or buy, the secondhand checks for recalls and bed bugs, and the move-in cash added up.

1. Essentials by need and by phase Understand

Essentials, in this manual, are the things a household needs for daily life in its home: to sleep, wash, eat, clean, see, sit, store, fix and stay safe. The word is this manual's working term, not a standard list, and the list is a starting point. A household needs what its days need, so the first job is subtraction.

This manual sorts essentials two ways. The first is by need, the part of daily life the item serves. The categories match the essentials reference: sleep, bathroom, kitchen, cleaning, laundry, light, seating and surfaces, storage, tools, safety, and paperwork. Sorting by need shows gaps. A list with three kinds of pan and no shower curtain has a bathroom gap, whatever its length.

The second is by phase, the point in the first months when the household needs the item. The four phases are this manual's convention; no agency sets them. Convention

The phase is set by need, not by price. A fire extinguisher is not expensive and still sits in the first month, because the first-night checks in First night and safety come first. A couch can be cheap secondhand and still wait, because a household that has lived in a studio for three weeks knows where it would go and whether it fits, and a household on its first day does not. Preference Your own phases can differ: a household that works from home may move a desk and chair into the first week.

What came with the home

Before marking anything, take out what the home already provides. In Lease and move-in record, the condition sheet recorded the appliances, fixtures and any furniture that came with the home. A furnished unit may provide a bed, a table and a couch; a partly furnished one, a refrigerator and a stove. Those items belong to the landlord: they stay, they are not sold or given away, and a problem with one goes to the landlord as a repair request. The essentials list starts from setup: a furnished home's list has no furniture rows, and a kitchenette's has fewer kitchen rows.

2. Have, borrow, secondhand or buy

Every item that survives the first cut gets a source, the way it reaches the home. The list has four:

• Have: you already own it, or it came with the home.
• Borrow: someone lends it, and it goes back. Family and friends are the usual lenders; some towns also have tool libraries.
• Secondhand: a used item, bought or given, from a person, a thrift store or a listing. It becomes yours.
• Buy: a new item from a store.

This manual does not choose for you. It names what tends to decide the choice and shows the order. Four questions settle most items:

A fifth question applies in a shared home: who pays. The list's "Who pays" column takes shared, mine or theirs. An item for the whole household (a vacuum, a shower curtain, a trash can) is usually shared; an item one person keeps when they move out is usually theirs. Convention The household's own agreement settles it, and shared purchases go on the ledger in Sharing a home.

Money does not appear in that table on purpose. This manual does not say what to spend, which brands to buy, or whether to borrow; those are your decisions. It does show the arithmetic of what the choices add up to, in section 5.

3. Before a used item comes in: recalls, cribs and bed bugs

A used item can carry two problems a new one usually does not: a recall, which is a maker's or regulator's notice that a product is unsafe and should be fixed, returned or destroyed; and pests, chiefly bed bugs. The checks below happen before the item comes through the door, because EPA's bed bug advice is to check secondhand furniture before bringing it home.

The recall search

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) keeps a searchable list of recalls (CPSC, Recalls & Product Safety Warnings). Search by the product type and the brand, then by the model number if the item has a label, usually on the back, the underside or inside a drawer. The search can be filtered by hazard, including tip-over, suffocation, entrapment and lead. CPSC also runs SaferProducts.gov, where anyone can read and file reports of harm from a product (SaferProducts.gov). Those reports are submitted by the public and reviewed by CPSC staff; a report is not a CPSC finding, but several reports about one model are worth reading before you take it.

CPSC's guide for resellers says selling a recalled product is illegal, and that this covers giving one away for free (CPSC, Resellers Guide to Selling Safer Products). The guide is written for stores and resellers, and we turn it around: what a reseller may not pass on is what a household should not accept.

What not to accept used

Three more groups sit outside this manual and outside its essentials list: car seats, bicycle and other helmets, and medical devices. Each has its own rules and its own experts, and a household that needs one asks them.

Checking for bed bugs

Bed bugs are small, flat insects that feed on blood and hide in the seams and cracks of beds and furniture. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says they travel on furniture, bedding, luggage, boxes and clothing, typically feed every 5 to 10 days, and can survive from several months to a year without feeding (EPA, Protecting Your Home from Bed Bugs). So a couch that has sat in a garage for a month is not thereby clear.

EPA says bites are a poor sign; look for physical signs instead (EPA, How to Find Bed Bugs):

• Rusty or reddish stains, from crushed bugs
• Dark spots, which are their excrement
• Eggs and eggshells, about 1 mm, and pale yellow skins they shed
• Live bugs

Where to look: the piping, seams and tags of a mattress; cracks in a bed frame or headboard; the seams of chairs and couches and between the cushions. EPA puts the size of a hiding place this way: "If a crack will hold a credit card, it could hide a bed bug." A flashlight and a card to run along the seams are the tools. EPA adds that carpet beetles are often mistaken for bed bugs; a local extension office or a pest professional can tell them apart from a clear photo or a sample. Ask the authority

EPA's prevention steps for the home: mattress and box-spring encasements (zippered covers that close around the whole mattress), less clutter, frequent vacuuming, and, in shared laundry rooms, carrying laundry in plastic bags; a dryer on high heat can kill bed bugs. In an apartment building, a bed bug problem is the landlord's to know about in writing (Cleaning safely).

4. Measuring before you buy, and bulbs by lumens

Two checks prevent most returns: whether the piece fits, and whether the light is bright enough.

Measure the spot and the route

A piece has to fit two places: where it will sit, and every door, hallway, stair and elevator between the street and that spot. Measure the spot and the route before you buy or accept anything large. Learn Space Planning's chapter on furniture you already own teaches the method, including the in-use space in front of a piece and the delivery route (Learn Space Planning, Furniture you have). We do not repeat it here. On the essentials list, write the measurements in the item's notes before you go shopping, so a listing's dimensions can be checked on the spot.

Light bulbs by lumens

Many first homes are dark in the evening: a studio may have one ceiling fixture, and a rental's fixtures may come with no bulbs in them. ENERGY STAR, run by EPA and DOE, says brightness is measured in lumens, not watts: find the lumens you need, then choose the bulb with the lowest wattage that gives them (ENERGY STAR, Learn About Brightness).

USFA adds one rule for the fixture: match the bulb's wattage to what the fixture is rated for, which is printed on a label inside it (USFA, Appliance and Electrical Fire Safety). Product-specific Color temperature, dimmers and where lamps go are in Learn Interior Lighting's chapter on bulbs and labels (Learn Interior Lighting, Bulbs and labels).

5. The move-in cash and the first month's spending

The move-in cash is the money a move asks for before the first month's routine begins: the first month's rent, sometimes the last month's, the security deposit, application and other fees, utility deposits and setup fees, and the essentials bought in the first week. The move-in cash calculator adds what you enter and shows three things: the total, the total per person if the cost is shared equally, and how much of the total is the deposit, which is returnable under the lease's terms and your state's rules (Lease and move-in record). The amounts are yours, from the lease, the providers and the list; this manual gives no typical figures.

The essentials total comes from the "Estimated cost" column of the list. A blank cost there means "not answered yet," not zero, and the list marks any total over a blank as incomplete. Type 0 for something that costs nothing (you have it, or you are borrowing it). Convention An incomplete total is still useful: it says how much is known and how many items are not.

A deposit is part of the cash a move takes, but it is a different kind of money from rent: it is held, not spent, and whether and when it comes back depends on the lease, the home's condition at move-out, and state law. That is why the calculator shows it apart from the total.

Tracking the first month

The first month's spending is the best record a household has of what the home actually costs. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's spending tracker gives a method: track everything you earn and spend for a month, or for a week or two if a month is too much; keep receipts in an envelope and write down purchases without one; total each category each week and then for the month; and circle the items that repeat every month, such as rent and the phone bill (CFPB, Spending tracker). It is one of the free worksheets in the CFPB's Your Money, Your Goals toolkit, which also has a bill calendar used in Weekly routines (CFPB, Your Money, Your Goals toolkit). The phased plan dates the month's total for the 30-day review.

6. See it: Dani's list and Rosa's crib See it

Free sources behind this chapter:

• CPSC, Recalls: the federal recall search, filterable by product and hazard.
• CPSC, Resellers Guide: the rules on cribs and infant products that set what a household should not accept used.
• EPA, How to Find Bed Bugs: the signs and the hiding places, with photos.
• CFPB, Spending tracker: a one-month worksheet, free to print.

7. Practice: the first-week list, marked and added up Practice

Minimum: the essentials list cut to what you will use, every first-night and first-week item marked with a source, the checks done for any used item you have already lined up, and the move-in cash total written on the list. Time: about an hour, plus the time a used item's checks take. Materials: the essentials list, the lease packet and the providers' amounts, the move-in cash calculator, a phone for the recall search, and for a used upholstered piece, a flashlight and a plastic card.

1. Delete what you have or will not use. Read each seeded row and ask whether your days need it. Delete it, or mark it "have" with a cost of 0.
2. Check the phases. Move any row whose phase does not fit your household, such as a desk into the first week if you work from home.
3. Mark a source for every first-night and first-week row: have, borrow, secondhand or buy. In a shared home, mark who pays.
4. Enter an estimated cost where you know one, 0 for have and borrow, and leave the rest blank rather than guessing.
5. Run the checks for each secondhand item before it comes in: the recall search by brand and model, the bed bug check for anything upholstered, and the CPSC infant-product rules for anything a child sleeps in. Check the "Checks done" box.
6. Add it up. Enter the lease and provider amounts and the list's total in the calculator, and write the calculator's total, and whether it is complete, in the notes of the list's first row.

8. Your home Your home

9. Check your work Check your work

Criteria

• Is every row left on the list one your household will use, with the rows you already have marked "have" or deleted?
• Does every first-night and first-week row have a source, and in a shared home, a "who pays"?
• Is each cost either a number you know, 0 for have and borrow, or blank, with no guesses entered as facts?
• For each secondhand item, was the recall search done, and for anything upholstered, the bed bug check, before it came inside?
• Is any crib or infant product on the list checked against CPSC's date and drop-side rules?
• Is the move-in cash total written on the list, with the deposit shown apart and the total marked complete or incomplete?

Worked example

Dani's list (fictional) has every first-night and first-week row marked, with costs for the rows they know and blanks for the rest. The neighbor's table had its recall search and a look at its legs before it came in. The move-in cash is $2,395 before essentials, $1,150 of it the deposit, with the essentials total marked incomplete. The list meets the criteria; what it does not yet show is which items wait for the first paycheck, which Dani decides when the blanks are filled.

Common mistakes

• Keeping every seeded row. The list is a starting point; a row your days do not need is not a gap.
• Entering 0 for an item whose cost you do not know. The total then looks complete when it is not; leave it blank.
• Bringing a free couch inside to look it over. The bed bug check happens before it comes in.
• Taking "no recall found" as "safe." A drop-side crib with no recall is still one CPSC says cannot meet the standard.
• Counting the deposit as spent. It is held under the lease's terms and may come back; the calculator shows it apart for that reason.

What is still unresolved

This chapter cannot say which items your household should buy first, how much to spend, or whether a particular used item is safe; it gives the order, the checks and the arithmetic. Which items wait for a paycheck is your decision. Whether the deposit comes back is settled at move-out by the lease, the condition record from Lease and move-in record and your state's rules. Where each item lives is Limited space; the kitchen rows are checked against the meals you cook in A working kitchen, and the cleaning rows against the products in Cleaning safely.

10. Knowledge check and scenario

Checklist

• Every first-night and first-week item on the essentials list is marked have, borrow, secondhand or buy.
• The move-in cash total is written on the list, with the deposit shown apart.
• Every secondhand item had its recall search, and every upholstered one its bed bug check, before it came inside.
• I marked the first-month rows and filtered the essentials reference by room. (Go deeper; optional)
• I started the CFPB spending tracker on the key day. (Go deeper; optional)