Michelle Castillo

The time comes in any first-time renter's life, distressingly often during that first year, when you have to make a choice:  Find a new roommate or a new apartment. 

Mike had decided to leave New York City and move back home to Las Vegas.  I chose looking for a new place over the crapshoot of seeking a new roommate. My two stipulations:  I wasn’t willing to pay more than my rent at the time, which was $975 a month, and I wanted a place that was easily accessible by subway. That pretty much meant I was moving to Brooklyn.

Spring cleaning: The most feared event of the year – well, for me at least. The idea of sorting through my packrat collection of junk frightened me. Unfortunately, my mother had drilled into me the importance of keeping house so to oblige my conscience I purge my apartment of all filth every spring.

My roommate Mike grudgingly agreed to join me in my quest after seeing the amount of lint that had accumulated behind the TV.  We could have hired a professional cleaner.There were even a few Groupons that offered cleaning and organizing services for a discount.

I recently reminisced with Mike, my first roommate in New York, about the good times we had in our small railroad apartment. Now a Las Vegas resident, he agreed that despite our past experiences with roommates (I had shared space back in Los Angeles), when we moved to this city, where apartments are more cramped, we discovered both how lucky we were and that we had a lot to learn.

Time to visit the family in California and enjoy a dose of good weather. This being New York, there are a few things to do before taking off, unless you enjoy coming back to a ransacked house, high bills (though no one was home) and leaks that need to be repaired immediately. I don’t.

Turn off everything 

If the weather outside is frightful, you can bet that there will be ice. In my apartment, ice kept creeping in around my air conditioner and seeping in through gaps between the window frame and window. After having to constantly have rags on hand to clean up the slushy mess plus seeing fuzzy green growing on my windowsill, I decided my second winter I would take precautions. Here are a few tips to break the ice:

If you’re like me, about halfway through the year you start getting the moving bug. It’s not that you want to move to a new city per se, but the idea of living in a different area or apartment starts to sound really appealing, especially when you get to know people with cheaper rent and better apartments-- sometimes in better areas--than the one in which you reside.

But in New York City, where you’re normally locked into a one-year lease, it can be hard to convince your landlord that you want to vacate mid-year.