First Apartment Checklist: What to Buy First, Room by Room

A set of tools you cook with, and a set of containers you eat out of. In that order. Everything else in a starter kitchen can wait a month and nothing bad happens.

Here's the thing about a first kitchen. You probably already own a pan, a gift or a hand-me-down. What you don't own is anything to stir with, so the first real purchase isn't cookware.

Get silicone over metal, and it isn't a close call. Most apartment pans are nonstick, and a metal spatula will score that coating inside a week.

Check for a heat rating printed on the box (anything rated to around 440°F covers every burner you will meet), and for a holder included in the set. A small kitchen has no drawer to spare.

• One holder on the counter beats four utensils loose in a drawer. Your drawers are about to be full.
• Skip the 30-piece sets. You'll use six of them, and the rest eat the space you were trying to save.
• Containers: go glass if you reheat. Plastic warps, stains orange from tomato sauce, and starts smelling like last week.

Glass or plastic for leftovers? Glass, if the cabinet has room. It goes fridge to microwave to dishwasher without a second thought, and it doesn't hold onto smells.

Plastic is the right call for dry pantry goods, or when you genuinely can't spare the weight.

One more thing: buy containers in one size, not a graduated set. Same-size lids fit each other, and in a shallow cabinet a lid that fits three containers beats variety.

Put bins in it before you put food in it. A rental fridge has two deep shelves and a crisper that sticks, and without dividers the back half becomes the place food goes to be forgotten.

This is the item people skip because it doesn't feel essential. Then six weeks later they're throwing out a yogurt that expired in a different month. That's money, and on a first-apartment budget it's money you noticed spending.

Clear bins, not opaque ones. The whole point is seeing the back without unloading the front. Look for a handle cut into the front edge too, because a bin you have to pinch from the sides just gets left where it is.

1. Group by when you eat it, not by what it is. Breakfast in one bin, lunch things in another. You reach for a meal, not for a category.
2. Put one bin at the very back of each shelf. That's the dead zone, and a bin with a handle turns it into a drawer you can pull.
3. Leave the door for condiments only. It's the warmest part of the fridge, so milk and eggs don't belong there no matter what the molded shelf suggests.

Do the same bins work in a cabinet? Yes, and that's the reason to buy a set rather than two. Anything left over goes under the bathroom sink or on the top shelf of a closet, which in a first apartment is usually the only storage you've got.

Into a divider, on day one, before the drawer fills itself. An empty drawer looks like a solved problem. It isn't. It's the room's default dumping ground, and one loose drawer is the fastest way for a tidy kitchen to stop feeling tidy.

Get an expandable one. That sounds like a minor feature, and it is the whole reason to buy a specific organizer rather than the first tray you see.

Apartment drawers are never a standard width. Measuring one correctly before you shop is a step you will skip, so buy the thing that slides out to fit whatever drawer you have.

• Measure the inside depth too, not just the width. A tray that sits proud stops the drawer closing.
• Put the organizer in before the cutlery, even if the cutlery is still in a bag on the counter.
• Leave one slot empty at the end. Something always shows up that has nowhere else to live.

Bamboo over plastic here, for one practical reason. It's heavy enough to stay put when you yank the drawer open. Light plastic trays slide forward, and then your forks are back in a pile.

What about the second drawer? Leave that one undivided on purpose. Every kitchen needs a drawer for the tape, the takeout menus and the spare keys, and if you don't designate one, the cutlery drawer becomes it.

Somewhere for shoes to land that isn't the floor. Most first apartments open straight into the living room, no hall and no closet by the door, so the first two feet of your home are a pile of sneakers.

It's the smallest fix on this list and the one a visitor registers first. It also solves a problem you can't see yet. Shoes on carpet by the door means grit walked into the room every single day, and a rental carpet is not a thing you get to replace.

Measure the wall, not the rack. You want narrow and tall rather than wide and low, because the wall beside a door is usually the only empty vertical you own.

Three tiers is the sweet spot. Anything taller starts to tip when someone kicks a shoe onto the top row.

• Open shelves over a closed cabinet. Wet shoes need air, and a box holds the smell.
• Check that the top surface is flat and solid. It becomes your key drop within a week whether you planned it or not.
• If the door swings toward that wall, measure the swing before you buy. It's the most common return in the category.

A broom and a hamper, and both are more urgent than the vacuum everyone tells you to buy. A vacuum is a real purchase that can wait a paycheck. Sweeping can't, and neither can having somewhere to put dirty clothes that isn't a chair.

On the broom: get the kind with rubber teeth along the dustpan edge. You drag the bristles across them and the hair comes out in one pull.

Sounds like a gimmick. It is the difference between sweeping and spending ten minutes picking your own hair out of a broom by hand.

On the hamper: collapsible, with handles, and with a lid if your laundry is down a hallway or in a basement.

• Handles aren't optional in a building. You're carrying it down stairs or through a shared laundry room, and no grip means two trips.
• A lid matters because the hamper lives in the open in a small apartment. It turns laundry into furniture.
• Collapsible earns its place on the empty days, when it folds flat and goes behind a door.

The rest of the cleaning list is genuinely just supplies. All-purpose spray, a sponge, trash bags, paper towels. Buy those wherever's cheapest and don't overthink them.