Surviving Your First Apartment: Personalization, Pets, and More

Signing the lease on my first apartment was one of my biggest introductions to #adulting. Everything about the process seemed to be one massive stressor after another. Knowing very little about the Maryland suburbs, hoping to have a dishwasher AND a washing machine, and having a recent college grad's budget of "LOL, no"all contributed to the chaos — it also didn't help that I made the brilliant decision to move into the apartment two days before boarding an airplane to Florida for a week.

Now that I've gone through the pleasures of adding a dog to a rental agreement, renewing my lease, and plotting my next escapade to Philadelphia (more on that later), I've had the time to look back on my first year and a half of Apartment Survival, and have made note of the things I wish I'd known sooner.

Consider Elevators and Stairs

We live on the top floor of a three-story building. This is simultaneously AWESOME and TERRIBLE, because we don't have to deal with upstairs neighbors tromping around on our beauty sleep, but we DO have to contend with two and a half flights of stairs when bringing in the groceries. I almost passed out (multiple times) on move-in day because I forgot that my puny human body can't carry the entire contents of two people's lives up the stairs in one trip. We survived, but I find myself cursing our decision every time I have to stagger up those rain-slicked steps with my arms full.

Check Your Delivery Radius

Shortly after moving in, we discovered that we were outside the delivery radius for most of the restaurants that brought us to our neighborhood. It wasn't THAT big of a deal, considering that I live about a ten-minute drive to literally anything your heart desires, but there's something incredibly disappointing about finally working up the budget and gumption to order dinner online, only to open Grubhub and see you have a grand total of six options. It took us almost an entire year to discover that the pizza place on the corner delivers (and totally rocks), but it's a far cry from having dozens of cuisines at my fingertips when I lived in the city. You trade a lot of pros and cons when you move from a city to the 'burbs. Make sure you're paying attention to them.

CHECK YOUR CELL PHONE SIGNAL

If you didn't guess from all the capital letters, this is the biggest mistake I ever made when renting a home. For one summer, I lived in a slapdash artists' colony-turned-renter home in the podunk side of a Maryland college town. I was so excited about the futon and the correspondingly low price tag that I didn't use my phone for more than taking a few pictures — and didn't realize until I moved in that I couldn't get any signal outside of WiFi. I survived it, but it made for an awkward four months.

You WILL Have Crazy Neighbors

This is a given. We have had so many. Take a deep breath. Neighbors are temporary, the crazy is forever.

Dogs Eat Literally Everything

For me, true emancipation from #dormlife meant candles, house plants, and pets. Immediately. I embarked on a nine-month campaign to convince my partner to get a dog with me, and when he expressed his doubts, we compromised and I got a dog anyway. (Sorry.) Piglet is a wonderful addition to the family, and I love her to death, but there is no way in hell we're getting our pet deposit back. She has chewed through carpets, ripped a panel off the hanging plastic curtains, peed on everything with a vaguely flat surface, and even figured out how to bite the actual walls. She's a magical creature. I don't know how she does it. If you're starting your first apartment lease and considering your first four-legged friend, make sure you read your lease carefully — and know what you're getting into when you start sharing your space with a wild animal. Pig has grown into a well-behaved young lady (I'm definitely not lying), but I can see the memories of her childhood everywhere — literally.

Make Your Space Your Own

This may seem like a bit of a no-brainer, but when you're moving into your first apartment you should make sure that something about it screams YOU. In my case, the walls of our apartment are plastered with posters, tapestries, bright colors, and crazy patterns. That's kind of my #thang, and even though I knew I wanted to go for a bohemian-hipster-let-loose-in-IKEA look, I didn't trust myself to really customize my space until I'd been living in it for a long time. I was overly careful about hanging posters (memories lurked in the shadows of ripping paint off dorm walls on move-out day). I didn't want to rearrange the furniture outside of the first place we put it. To this day, I still haven't hung up the Christmas lights that were a fixture in every dorm room I lived in. But I came to realize that whenever I added a pop of something that was ME — potted herbs on the balcony, a framed photo on my desk, salt and pepper shakers shaped like dinosaurs with bow ties — I had an immediate pleasure response akin to putting on a warm sweater on a cold day. There's something so special about making a space your own, even if it's through as small an action as hanging up a poster. The perks of renting an apartment and signing a lease mean you CAN make a lot of changes — so long as you can put them right by the time you move out. (A lot of landlords even allow you to paint nowadays! We didn't, but you might be able to.)

All in all, surviving your first apartment is more about approaching it with the right attitude than having a thousand tips for success. No matter how much obsessive research you do, how many cost-analyses you run, how many times you think to yourself "oh my God, why did I want to be an adult when I was thirteen," you're going to go into your first apartment feeling like you simultaneously got swindled and handed the keys to the proverbial Mustang.

The world is your oyster — or at least, your first apartment is. Once you get inside, all you have to do is find your pearl.