I’m lookin at the lonnnggggg list of “absolutely won’t be able to survive without” stuff we dopers have recommended to Pammi, and I’m thinking about how little discretionary income I had when I first moved out. Yup, Pammi needs an apartment warming party.
Congrats on your new place,
Abby
P.S. Pammi email me your addy and I’ll send you a flashlight and some batteries, or a fire extinguisher, or something you will find useful. 
A good pair of scissors. I wound up stealing one of my mother’s out of desperation.
And don’t throw away all of your boxes. Inevitably, you will take stuff out that you’ll end up storing anyway.
A colander, for all the mac’n’cheese you’ll be having shortly after paying the rent.
A basic tool set - screwdriver (Philips and flat), hammer, various sizes of nails, maybe a drill. If you buy stuff at IKEA, you’ll have more farglebarging Allen wrenches than you can shake a stick at.
Hopefully some good decorating taste.
Of course for a first apartment you will need…
a bookshelf made from 1’ x 6’s and concrete blocks
stolen milk crates for storage
buy roach spray now
something you will not want your folks to see that you will have out when they drop by unannounced
A bunch of suckers to move you stuff for you
you may want some social skills as well although I got along fine with out them
Also when you sign a lease take a poloroid camera and take photos of the apartment’s condition when you move in. Take close ups of stains and damage with copies and give a set to the office and keep a set for when you move out.
I think all of the suggestions above are fabulous. I would like to add that you should make sure that the very first box that gets carried into the apartment, and gets a place of honor on the kitchen counter so you can find it quickly, contains the following:
I have moved many times over the years, and I’ve always had the same volunteers make time to help me, because I treated them well, and was prepared for the misery.
I can’t believe no one is mentioning a shower curtain and bath mats!! Only one of the apartments I’ve lived in had a shower curtain provided and I replaced it with my own anyway. And bath rugs are a must! There’s nothing worse than stepping out of the shower and getting the floor all wet and then stepping in the wet spots in your bare (or socked) feet!
When I moved out of my parents house (on my 18th birthday too!) I was totally unprepared for everything I would need in my apartment. The apartment came furnished so I didn’t have to bring furniture. My parents bought me curtains and a new bedding set and lots of towels and stuff. Then they followed me over to my new apartment and surprised me with about 20 bags of groceries!! Flour, sugar, salt, pepper, butter, ketchup, mustard, etc., etc. Everything that would I didn’t even think of they had for me. It was great.
Congrats on the new place. Enjoy it!
My very first apartment had a bed that folded out of the wall - I thought that was the neatest thing I’d ever seen!! It struck me as the perfect Must Have for a first apartment…
*What???
And nobody’s mentioned a pot to piss in?
Seriously, some inexpensive pots/pans. I’d get a Big-Ass Pot for boiling pasta, potatoes, etc., a 2-quart (or so) for heating sauce, oatmeal, etc., and 10 or 12-inch frying pan. If you can, get a pan where the lid of the big pot will fit the pan, too.
Most people can live on three cooking knives: an 8", a 3", and a bread knife. Everything else is just convenience.
Some really basic oven-proof casseroles, like Pyrex or Corning Ware, for making baked mac & cheese, tuna-noodle hotdish, or lasagne.
If you really hate cooking, consider a Microwave. They’re remarkably cheap these days, and you really can do quite a lot with them.
The following appliances aren’t totally essential but can be had very inexpensively: a Mr. Coffee, a basic toaster or toaster/oven, and a handheld mixer.
A basic set of cooking utensils - spatulas, measuring spoons, etc. These now come as all-in-ones at Target and K-Mart.
A full-length mirror, especially if you’ll be starting a new job or interviewing. They can be had for about $10-$20.
Some other hardware and cleaning-type things: WD-40, Krazy Glue, Dran-O, duct tape, a rubber bucket. Make sure the smoke alarm works (many take 9-volt batteries - buy a couple to have on hand), and if you’re over a garage you might want a carbon monoxide alarm, too. Check the electrical - if the circuit breakers or fuses aren’t labelled, take 15 minutes switching things on and off. If you’re unfortunate enough to have fuses (only applies if your apartment’s pretty old) go out and buy a few. You might want a fire ladder, too, depending on what floor you’re on and how far you are from an escape.
This is sounding intimidating, but much of it you might get as hand-me-downs from your family or from thrift shops. In our family we’re very partial to Goodwill Industries, since their stores provide job training for the handicapped.
No apartment is complete without a water pipe and a stash of lighters.
Your mother.
Seriously, though: I’m on my second decade of bachelorhood, and I’ve learned that there are a lot of things you can do without. And many of them are things people have listed here.
Here are things I’ve found are essential:
[li] Mattress or futon. Frame and headboard is optional. It could be an out of service frieght elevator, but if it’s got a mattress, it’s home. And if it’s a one room apartment, then it’s also the main piece of furniture.[/li]
[li] Television. Without something to distract you from the bare walls and the chores your mother would be doing if it were her house, you’d go completely batty. (You’re not male, so I won’t include a VCR for the rental porn.)[/li]
[li] Computer. Ditto.[/li]
[li] Basic appliances. You gotta at least have a stove and a fridge. Most apartments come with these but that’s not the standard everywhere. You’ll eventually want your own washer and dryer, too, even if there is a laundry in the building.[/li]
[li] Lamps. No apartment has light fixtures where you need them.[/li]
[li] Alarm Clock. A loud one. Your mommy ain’t going to be waking you up any more.[/li]
And my favorite bachelor tip is to NOT buy a bunch of towels, sheets, dishes, cutlery, glassware, etc. Because the more you own, the more you’ll have to wash. Believe me, at least once, every dish you own will be in the sink, and if you only own a few, then washing them will be easy.
As for everything else, you can wait until you identify the need to buy it. If you go to WalMart or Target and buy all the little piddly crap listed in this thread at once, you’ll blow an entire paycheck.
Cleaning supplies:
bottle of ammonia or Lysol type cleaner (bleach is good too) no need to live with the germs of the previous tenent.
Four sponges. One for dishes, one for counter tops, one for the bath and one as a spare. (don’t forget some dish detergent)
Vinegar and a bottle. Mix with half water to clean windows and mirrors. Using old newspaper you have the cheapest and easiest way to clean glass.
A toilet brush – works great with bleach.
Other than that, look around your friend’s and family’s homes and look for those things you can’t live without. If you are short on money, go to garage/yard sales and buy up used tableware and other kitchen items. Chances are you will get rid of them later when you have more money and can afford some nice stuff.
Good luck on your new digs and take some pictures for us!
I’m not even going to read the rest of the thread before I second this one.
Your landlord’s insurance covers your landlord’s property - not yours.
It’s really fairly cheap. It has been several years ago, but I beleive we were paying less than $125 a year.
Even a single person in a modestly furnished apartment can have $10,000 worth of stuff to lose - clothes, bikes, electronics, furniture (even hand me down furniture has value - what are you going to sit on when that duct-taped beanbag is a smoldering lump of bubbling goo?) school books or professional equipment, computers. This is one expense you won’t regret when the drunk nicotine addict upstairs nods off and starts a four-alarm blaze.
-mdf
A wood toilet seat and lid
A brown shag carpet toilet seat cover.
A mirror to hang over the toilet, for the gents.
A mirror to hang over your bed.
A waterbed
A lava lamp
A strobe light
A padded headboard (brown Naugahyde)
A red-light
A black light
Scented massage oils
A tube of K-Y Jelly
A pack of smokes
A lighter
An ashtray
Have fun.
except that KY is gross… go with Astroglide instead.
And this isn’t a thing its more a piece of information that doesn’t always occur to people who haven’t done a whole heck of a lot of unsupervised housecleaning:
NEVER NEVER NEVER mix a cleaning product that contains bleach with a cleaning product that contains ammonia. You will get some kind of horrible ?-chloric Acid vapor (Hydrochloric?) which can damage your lungs permanently. To be safe, never mix cleaning products at all, but if you must, check labels carefully and rinse all surfaces well.
I don’t know where bughunter is from, but I’ve never had the experience of an apartment in the U.S. that didn’t come with appliances. This is common in Europe, though, from what I hear.
Your first grocery run (the one where you buy cooking oil, flour, sugar, salt, saran wrap, etc.) is a real killer.
I got almost all of my small appliances – toaster, microwave, coffee machine, blender etc. from yards sales. Get up early on a saturday, pick up the paper, and troll the sales before the good stuff gets snaped up. Don’t be a-feared to bargain. (Actually, I got a full-size microwave and my 2 cats at a yard sale for $5!)
In some communities here in Southern California, rental properties do not necessarily come with appliances. These are generally the older buildings with just a few units, or single-family dwellings converted to multiple apartments. There are a lot of both in Pasadena, where I live.
The huge, overdeveloped (high rent) apartment complexes usually include everything you need.
Except shower curtains. I did forget about that, even after Rachelle mentioned it.
A hammer and some nails.
Some screw drivers - Phillip’s, Robertson, flat head, etc. One of those combo ones is ok, but sometimes they don’t provide enough torque, so individual ones are better.
An exacto knife (or one of those knives with the retractable blades).
A portable sewing kit.
Duct tape.
Contact cement.
A sense of humour.
And if you can’t pack your mother, at least pack your mother’s phone book. Sit down and copy out (or photocopy) the stuff that you might need from your mother’s phone and address book. I can’t count the number of times I had to call Mom to get Grandma’s address, my dentist’s number, the name of the vet, my cousin’s birthday, etc.
Other things that come to mind:
Extra pillow and blanket for when you have people crash on your couch (or when you want to crash on your couch in front of Saturday morning cartoons without tearing apart your bed)
Ice cube trays, figure out how many you will need, and get two more.
Extra batteries (for alarm clocks, smoke alarm, remote control)
If you are moving your stuff into the apartment in boxes, save a few and stash them under your bed once you unpack. They will come in handy if you have to move stuff again.
A strange thing I do – put your stereo on about as loud as you usually like it, and go outside and see if you can hear it from the hall, porch, or what have you. I like to know what neighbors are complaining about before they complain.
Make an extra set of keys now, and give them to someone you trust, and can get ahold of easily in case of emergency!
Good luck with your new place!
Brass pole you can slide around on…oops, I thought it said “Must Haves for a fire department?” Sorry about that.
In that case, you need a brass pole you can slide around on. 
A skink, a wig, and some sodium amytal for those duplicitous itinerant apple juice salesmen.
Trust me now, you’ll thank me later.
Oh, and maybe a futon.
Some way to get rid of people.
This was a major problem with my first apartment. I didn’t have a way to get rid of them so they just kept showing up.
I have to second the plunger, toilet brush and toilet bowl cleanser. It costs about $10 total, but if you don’t have one, things get disgusting pretty quickly. It was actually kind of sad the number of excited emails that my suitemates and I wrote over winter break because one of us had finally bought the plunger (which has acted like our magic protection against evil toilet spirits since - no stuffed toilets, whereas we had about 5 in the five months before we bought it!).
In no particular order:
A bunch of rags for cleaning up stuff - using paper towels for wiping up spills, cleaning the sink, etc., gets pretty expensive pretty quickly.
A vegetable peeler. (Also, since there’s no parent around to make sure that you eat right, vow that you will eat a vegetable every day - otherwise it’s really easy to live on noodles and cereal.)
If you don’t live right by the supermarket and will need to carry your stuff, get one of those old-lady wheeled carts to pull your groceries home, especially for that first big run.
Get some posters to hang on the walls, because otherwise, things just look really depressing.
Remember to call the phone company to arrange for your phone installation before you move in, or you won’t have a phone line for at least a week afterwards.
Towel rods or hooks for the bathroom if there aren’t any.
If you have apartment-mates, get a permanent marker so that you can label whose stuff is whose.
A (sponge, not string) mop and bucket, for the bathroom and kitchen.
Laundry detergent, and a pile of quarters for the laundromat.
Things that are nice to have around (but not strictly necessary) that I don’t think have been mentioned yet: a cutting board, a little plastic sponge-holder to go next to the sink, oven mitts, a really big bowl (for mixing, holding large batches of stuff, for serving if you’ve got company - it can be a $1.99 plastic thing), some sort of spatula-like thing for use with the frying pan (to make omelets, among other things), a little sewing kit, stamps and envelopes, and a dishrack.