Moving into a house in Minnesota in November? You’ll be needing a good snow shovel, a flat-bladed shovel to scrape the ice that the snow shovel misses, and a huge container of sidewalk salt. Remember how your landlord used to deal with that shit? That’s all you now, baby.
And shovel onto your yard, not onto the street. Only rampant savages shovel onto the street.
Smoke Detectors. ( what??? 
)
CO Detectors.
Lead test for the water pipes.
Registered Sex Offender check for the neighborhood.
Have you driven up and parked and sat and listened to the street at various times of the day? How’s the noise? Traffic? Neighbors playing tunes that just aren’t quite your taste?
Good results on complete home inspection?
Lead paint check if the house is older? Asbestos? Mercury? Mercury in retrograde? 
Enjoy the new digs and congratulations !!
Find the nearest Home Depot, plot the shortest route, and set aside 30% of your paycheck.
Find the nearest hardware store (not Home Depot. The place with a REAL “hardware store guy” that knows how to connect “this” with “that” when your plumbing goes bad.) Set aside 30% of your paycheck.
Find the nearest Target store - set aside 30% of your paycheck.
Figure out how to live on 10% of your paycheck for a while.
Set aside 90% of your weekends for the next, oh, 50 years for house/yard work.
Dude, toilet paper. Seriously. Every time I’ve moved I’ll bring over the first truckload, get halfway through, have to go to the bathroom, and realize there’s no TP in the new house.
Oh, and don’t forget to budget for any utilities your landlord took care of that you’ll have to pay now. I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal, but an extra frickin’ $150 a month for water, sewer, and garbage pickup about kills me.
Psst, Kapowzler, he’s talking about the plumbing. Just in case you were confused. 
(And a lead test isn’t a big priority unless babies, children, or pregnant ladies are going to be drinking the water regularly).
Make sure you get to the appropriate Registry of Deeds (typically located in your County seat) and research the property back at least 50 years: owners, liens (and their satisfaction), rights-of-way, encumbrances, etc.
Somehow doubt that is going to be the case at Casa Kapowzler.
Or, when you get your title insurance, they will offer the basic insurance and 4 or 5 optional coverages for additional fees. Just buy all of them.
You forgot the toilet paper.
You know.
Fer Shit?
Yes - those title insurance companies love the idea that many buyers aren’t interested in spending an hour to discover readily available details about the most expensive thing they’ll ever buy.
Meh. Sure you can do that, and probably should, but title insurance companies are really good at doing that. They can do it better than most people can, and if you buy the insurance, they take on the liability.
You don’t really think **Kapowzler **would do that shit better than the title insurance company do you?
It’s possible (I’ve definitely seen it happen). Title insurance companies are lazy, and not infrequently miss things. They know that few properties have issues, so extreme care is rarely needed and laziness is rarely punished.
And there are many things unrelated to clear title that a property owner still ought to know about. It simply makes sense to learn the history of your property, the description of its bounds, the rights-of-way that may exist on it, etc., etc.
Let’s invert the question: beyond the hour of your time it consumes, what is the downside of learning the history and details of a property you are about to buy?
You mean the easement that the students at the high school up the street have created for themselves by walking through your back yard? Or the fact that your neighbor built the six-foot privacy fence a few inches on the wrong (i.e. your) side of the property line? The former happened to an acquaintance and the latter happened to my now-former neighbor. In both cases, these were dealbreakers, so I guess it’s a good idea to do a little homework.
1: Make sure the utilities, trash companies etc. have all the info they need to switch services over.
2: If any work that was done on the house re heat, air, plumbing electric etc. has transferable warranties make sure you get copies of them.
3: Make sure all the major appliance manuals are in a folder.
4: Make sure you know how to get underneath the house in an emergency to shut off water etc.
5: Make sure you have done all your important address switch overs with the post office. Now would be a good time to switch to online billing and payment if you have not done so already. Huge time and expense saver.
6: Get a 25 or 50 count box of those huge, industrial sized, super thick green trash bags for moving and trash disposal. They’re great for stuffing clothes, towels, etc., and after being used as moving bags can be used as trash bags.
7: Re-key the doors at some point after moving in then make multiple copies of the key for yourself. Hide a house and car key in a non-obvious location and container somewhere outside. This will be a huge ass saver at some point (trust me).
8: Don’t forget the monkey chow.
You guys don’t get real estate lawyers to handle your title searches and stuff? Freak show.
Getting the professionals involved when appropriate: smart.
Refusing to take an interest in easily examined details of a property on which you’re about to drop serious money: very foolish.
What Xema said.
In my post, both people had had their lawyers do the searches and legal stuff, but the easement in the back yard had not been recorded because it was an implied easement created when generations of high school kids cut through Old Man Smith’s unfenced yard to save themselves an extra block of walking. My acquaintance only found out about the easement when she asked about fencing the yard off for her dog. And in the case of my former neighbor, the erroneous placement of the fence was discovered when she had the sewer lines or plumbing inspected. She and her husband decided that if the neighbors were going to be that sloppy when it came to things like property lines, they weren’t going to be very good neighbors about other things. (FTR, my neighbor and her husband turned out to be right; these people turned out to be grade-A assholes who would have made their lives miserable.) Both people learned to ask more detailed questions when house-hunting.
Easements are covered here in the Real Property Report that is required to be provided for each real estate deal.
ETA: I should say, I’m not saying our way is better than yours, just that yours is completely different from ours.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Dude!
I am more like a glass is half-full, while that shit looks like glass-half empty.
If I had something like that, it would be crawlin’ outta the fuckin’ ground and shit.
That shit freaks me out.
Word.
Perhaps you should check to make sure there are no old graveyards or indian burial grounds on your property. 