What should I do first when I move into a new place?

Before the boxes, before the first night, five things that take an afternoon and save the year: the locks, the shut-offs and alarms, the bills you can ask about before you sign, the boxes you do not pay for, and two records for a future you.

Change the locks the day you get the keys. Change the locks the day you get the keys says the handover gave you keys, not the only keys: six separate conversations there carry former owners trying an old key on a house they sold, a management company that never updated its list, a spare hidden forty years ago that still turned. Rekey or change every outside lock before the first night; two conversations say rekeying the existing locks is the cheap version, and two say a cylinder swap is a screwdriver job. Clear and reprogram the garage opener, because the fix is in the motor’s memory, not the remotes. The page’s safety lines sit beside the locks: find the shut-offs on day one, the main water valve, the gas valve, the electrical panel, and have the whole household know where they are, because a burst pipe does not wait for you to learn the house; and read the dates on the smoke and carbon-monoxide alarms, because the United States Fire Administration says a smoke alarm is replaced ten years from the date on its back and a carbon-monoxide alarm by the maker’s stated life, five to ten years. If you smell gas at any point, leave and call your country’s gas emergency line. If you rent and the agreement forbids a lock change, ask the landlord in writing to rekey.

Interview the apartment’s bills before you sign. Interview the apartment’s bills before you sign says the bill for that exact address already exists, and some utility companies will read you an estimate built from the previous tenant’s twelve months. One broke student took the cheapest place they could find at three hundred fifty a month; the person at the utility counter warned them the bills ran high, and high turned out to be nearly four hundred a month, more than the rent. On the tour, read the windows, feel around the frames on a windy day, notice single panes; read the trees, because big leafy trees to the south and east are summer shade and evergreens to the north are a windbreak; and ask which utilities the rent already covers, because heat included changes the whole maths of a slightly higher rent.

The boxes are free if you ask first. The liquor store has your moving boxes says the strongest free boxes are the ones built to carry bottles and paper; eighteen separate conversations name the liquor store first, then the produce aisle for apple boxes and the toilet-paper aisle for the sturdiest board in the shop. The one rule the page will not soften: ask first, because cardboard behind a shop is usually baled and sold, and taking it unasked is, in the accounts’ own words, theft. Call the day before the delivery. Inspect anything that held food, banana boxes above all. The page carries the argument about free mismatched boxes against a paid uniform stack, four accounts to four, and its deciders are whether anyone is on the clock, how many trips, and what is inside.

Two records for future you. A chipped pet still needs your phone number on file says having a chip implanted does not register it, and a registration is a live thing: you moved, or changed your number, and the entry still holds the old one, so a record with a dead number looks exactly like a working safety net until it is needed. Look the chip number up and see whose details come back, and do it again every time you move. A chip is not a tracker; in the first ten minutes, what works is a collar with a tag, because neighbours do not carry scanners. Leave notes for future you is smaller still: write the circuit-breaker number on the back of the faceplate while the plate is already off, photograph every sticker that will fade, and check the warranty that came with the house before calling a repair company, because one member paid out of pocket for a repair the home warranty would have covered had they filed first.

Who this is not for. The locks page says it: if the person with a key is someone you are afraid of, a lock is one step and not the plan, and the pages on leaving are where that plan lives. The boxes page names anyone paying movers or a truck by the hour, for whom uniform boxes pay for themselves before the first coffee. And the chip page says in countries with one national registry the failure it describes is more or less impossible; in the US, registration is voluntary and split across private registries, and a blank lookup needs reading twice.