Moving can be a pain in the ass and a lot can go by the way side if you’re not careful about where you decide to live. Thankfully we got a handful of solid suggestions that you should take to heart when deciding to move.
If you have any other useful moving tips that aren’t included feel free to add them in the comments below. My only suggestion would be to check your balconies for spider webs. I use to live in an apartment right on the water and our balcony would be covered in spider webs during the summer. It was pretty gross especially when the spiders would come out at night and you can visibly see hundreds over spiders crawling all over your bedroom window. Here’s what everyone else had to say.
“I always check if the shower is getting hot and has proper flow. I’ll never forget living in my first student flat in a cold winter where the shower wouldn’t get hot. That was beyond fucking annoying.”
“How much notice he has to give before showing up for whatever reason. Ideally, you want an expressed term of time. I had a lease that stated “reasonable” notice and the law only required the same. As a result, my landlord thought four hours notice was reasonable when I wouldn’t even get the message of my phone until much later. I thought 24 hours was reasonable.”
“As a kid who grew up in a roach infested apartment in a bad area. The first thing I do when looking at a place is go into the cabinets and crevices and check for droppings. Yes roaches leave shit tons of shit, even if the owner tries to clean it up, if there are bugs you’ll eventually find some droppings. As someone who went through that once, fuck noise and water pressure, this is the most important thing to check for.”
“Go to the property at night and see what the noise is like.”
“Check the signal on your phone.”
“If your realtor says “built to code”, that means they made the building as crappy as legally possible.”
“Try to visit the property during a workday, not during a weekend, so you get a feeling for the amount of noise and traffic around the property. Also try to contact and ask one of the other people already living there so you can ask them how the landlord behaves in general.”
“Ask what your Internet options are?”
“Avoid living west of your work if you drive there. Sun in eyes both ways everyday sucks.”
“What utilities are included in the rent, and how much do they cost?”
“Water pressure is an important thing to check. Turn on the shower, flush a toilet. If it’s an older property (house) check for cracks along the baseboards and near the ceiling – can be a sign of the foundation sinking.”
“If you’re in an apartment complex, check that there aren’t a million petty signs up in the foyer telling you what you can’t do – trash, noise, parking etc. It’s a giveaway that your neighbours are gonna be a problem.”
“Are there children in the building/surrounding units? Children stumbling around the apartment and bawling their eyes out in the middle of the night will drive you insane.”
“Who are the previous tenants, how did they die, how long did they die since moving into this property. Horror movies have totally prepped me for this.”
“Pitch a tent and check the place out for at least four regular weeks, and at least three holidays.
Then go down to the local pub and have a beer, check that there aren’t too many alcoholics, then ask about local legend.
Then you need to go down to the local library to read about the town’s history and if the house or nearby houses have been haunted.
Then listen in on police radio for at least a combined radio-time of 40 hours, to see if there is a lot of crime in the area.
Then you check the sex-offender registry, and get the information of each of the tenants of the building. After that you stalk each of them at least one work day, and one full weekend. Then you go on TOR and find some Russian hackers, pay them to hack the tenant’s and landlord’s social media to see what they’ve been up to.
After that all you need to do is make a freedom of information-act request for the JFK case, to be perfectly sure your neighbours-to-be weren’t involved.
Then move back with your parents, the only safe place in existence.”