“Ecch.
HGTV, are you listening right now? Apartment Therapy, open your fucking ears and your eyes and whatever other holes you have that can do listening.
You all need to do a show/book/whatever about people who are in ACTUAL apartments with ACTUAL spaces and what they look like and ACTUAL budgets and who DON’T want to spend $10,000 renovating an apartment they’ll live in for less than a year.
Seriously, where is that show? Where is that book?
And how great would it be? “Hi, I’m Dan. I’m living in Chicago. I don’t own a car and have to live where I can catch a bus or a train, and I have $650 a month to spend on rent. Here are my options, and what can we do to make it not horrible?” THAT’S a show, people. That’s the struggle. Screw international House Hunters. Those fools? Who cares what someone with a million-dollar budget can buy on an island paradise?
You want my tips? As a serial renter of shitty apartments? Here you go, Pete’s Tips for Moving and Renting Lousy Apartments:
1. If a wall decoration is paper and it’s unframed, throw it out when you move. If you don’t care enough to buy a $9 frame for something, then it’s not that important to you. These things do not move with you.
2. Get a half-height kitchen garbage can and keep it in a cabinet. This reduces the odor, and also means you have to take out the garbage more often, before it becomes a 25-lb. stinkbag. This is a good thing all around.
3. Every apartment I’ve moved into, without exception, has terrible window coverings. Curtains that are stained and weird and rigged up with some kind of Yugoslavian sliding situation. Get some hooks, hang a bar over the top, and put your own coverings over the ones provided. This is the easiest way to make your windows not look like dogshit while keeping intact whatever craziness the landlord has decided on. Plus, when you move on, you can take that stuff with you, and hooks with adjustable poles are pretty versatile.
4. In the course of living in your apartment, little things will break. A towel bar will come off the wall, a faucet will drip. Fix these things yourself. This is a good opportunity to practice some handyman skills because you can always say, “I don’t know, it’s just been like that” if you have to sound the alarm and call the landlord. Plus, waiting on a landlord to fix the small stuff is almost always a horrible proposition.
5. Top floor. My god, if you can, top floor. Noisy neighbors above are way worse than beside or below. Trust me on this one, don’t fuck around, top floor if at all possible.
6. A new toilet seat is like 10 bucks. Just buy one. Just assume that the one in your new place has been used by hundreds of strangers. Start thinking of toilet seats not as a part of the structure of your apartment, but as a disposable commodity. Because that’s what they are. This goes double for plungers, shower curtains, and basically anything that someone left in the bathroom at your place to do you a favor.
7. You don’t need a dining room table.
8. The last place I moved to, I had a dresser, and I screwed an upside-down U-shaped set of pipes onto the top of the dresser to work as a clothes rack. This is like the smartest thing I’ve ever done. When you’re renting, all bets are off on what the closet situation is going to be. Build your own damn closet and you’ll never have to worry about it.
9. Lay down mats in your fridge. I got a few placemats from Target for a few bucks, you lay those suckers down on the wire racks, and the whole thing looks a lot better. Plus, way easier to clean.
10. Murphy beds and foldable tables are not good solutions. I can tell you right now, across the world there are hundreds and thousands of Murphy beds that get folded down and stay down for weeks at a time. You don’t want to fold up your bed and rebuild a living room every day. The only times these are workable is when the Murphy bed is in a room for guests, and that way you can just have it folded up most of the time.
11. Don’t tell your friends that you’re moving. All you’re gonna get is a bunch of unsolicited advice, most of it from people who have not rented for a decade. They’re just going to make you feel like shit about how much you’re paying, where you’re located, and all that junk. I know they mean well, but it’s like having a baby. Tell people you’re pregnant, and get ready to answer the same five questions and then to receive a bunch of advice that you probably don’t want.
12. If your friends help you move, have ALL your shit packed before they show up, and pay them with money. Be a fuckin’ grownup. Pizza and beer is what brings them back to breaking even, so a little cash on top is nice.
13. The poor man’s version of noise-canceling headphones is a set of earbuds paired with hearing protection used for construction or at a shooting range. This works pretty great, honestly, and the ear protection is cheap.
14. Don’t rent a house, rent an apartment. Seriously, a rental house has all the immutability of an apartment combined with yardwork. It’s the worst of both worlds.
15. Indoor succulents are nice, and you can plant that shit in just about anything.”