So I've got a few goals that I want to accomplish by august...
1) Find a nice apartment
2) If a friend bags on me - find a good roommate
3) Furnish said apartment
Finding an apartment
So I figure craigslist is a good starting point. I'll also be looking through google's apartment finder to get an idea of prices, but does anyone have any particular resources they use to go apartment hunting? Also - how open are rental places to negotiating prices/deals? How can I verify that the landlord isn't awful?
Finding a good roommate
Assuming I get an apartment - how should I go about finding a roommate? Craigslist again? How do people normally weed out people who cannot pay rent on time and are not compatible? Ask for references?
Furnishing
I plan on heading to an auction house that runs stuff every two weeks in my town - I hear you can find amazing deals there. Anyone know where I can find a decent bed? Desk? Things of that nature? I'll definitely be tapping into family and looking at tag sales, but I'm wondering if there is another avenue for picking up cheap but decent stuff.
Posts
As for the other pieces, if you have the talent and the equipment, you can actually build some furniture yourself for relatively cheap. I've built a simple platform bed for about $100, a bookcase for $60, and some Adirondack patio furniture for about $50 per. If you don't have experience building things, you can always start simple; buy a cordless drill and a Kreg R3 jig, and have the lumber cut at any hardware store for free, and you can put together almost anything. Use Google SketchUp to plan anything you want, or use their database and download from a huge assortment of plans, and then use the CutList addon to generate a cut list you can use to buy lumber and make cuts.
Don't forget freecycle, if it's an active community, as a resource. Stuff that's actually useful gets snapped up on there pretty quickly but you may get lucky - we got a pretty nice small sofa that way, and they even drove it over to our apartment and helped us haul it up the stairs for free.
Finding an apartment, craigslist is definitely a good start, don't forget your local paper as well, also just drive around neighborhoods you like and look for For Rent signs as some people still just put those up and call it good. See if you can find a good landlord review site (the usage and popularity of these waxes and wanes, so look for one that's relatively up to date), though this is going to be more helpful if you're renting from a big company vs a smaller one. If the current tenant is there when they show it to you, don't be afraid to ask if the landlord is decent. Look for signs that the landlord isn't good about fixing things, like broken plumbing, or as a good example we viewed an apartment that was really cute except that the kitchen floor was slowly migrating into the ground; the landlord seemed to think this was no problem at all when we asked him about it, and that it added character.