Roommates are generally pretty cool dudes. They do awesome stuff like pay the part of the rent you can't afford, and sometimes they're even pretty fun to hang out with. Being a young apartment dweller generally necessitates that you share your living situation, and so most of us go through the process of living with a series of people whose headspace we might not necessarily want to occupy if we were a little bit richer. Everyone who has roommates gets stuck with a bad one at one point or another, be they hyperactive, socially oblivious, or passive-aggressive--or some jackpot combination of all three. Even the most well-meaning apartment companions tend to have some habits that will inevitably annoy their surrounding humans. But for some reason, every bad roommate I've ever had has displayed the same bad living habits. Maybe most young people are just bad at keeping house, or maybe general apathy regarding the living situation tends to manifest in specific, similar ways. Either way, if you live with someone who's not you and you break these basic home welfare rules, you deserve an indefinite string of roommates even worse than you.

Apartment living as a young adult can be tricky at first. You're still figuring out how to take care of the new place you call home, how to cook and clean up after yourself unassisted. And then there's all this stuff that people want to sell you. Since I moved into my first apartment two years ago, I've found that a lot of standard home products are easily replaced by cheap or free solutions. If you're new to the apartment game, budgeting is always good. These are five things I eventually realized I didn't really need to buy.

An Electric Coffee Maker
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