Your First Canadian Apartment: A Move-In Checklist

You have the keys. That is the hard part done — and it is also the moment when tired people sign things they have not read and skip the twenty minutes of work that protects their deposit a year later. This is the practical sequence for the week around moving in: what to inspect, what to read in the lease, what to switch on, and what to buy first so an empty flat becomes somewhere you can sleep.

Before the furniture: document the condition

Do this before a single box comes through the door, because an empty room photographs honestly and a furnished one does not.

Walk every room with your phone and take far more photographs than feels reasonable. Corners of floors. Skirting boards. The inside of every cupboard. The bathroom grout. Window frames and sills. Any mark on any wall. Get close-ups of anything already damaged, and a wide shot of each room so the close-ups have context. Photograph the appliances inside and out, and take a short video walking through the whole unit narrating what you see.

Then check that your photographs carry a date. Most phones record this automatically, but confirm it — undated evidence is worth much less in a dispute.

If your landlord provides a condition inspection report or move-in checklist, fill it in properly rather than signing a blank one, note every defect however small, and keep your own signed copy. Some provinces make this inspection a formal part of the tenancy process with rules about when it must happen and what it means if it does not. Your provincial residential tenancy authority publishes the requirements — read them for your province rather than assuming the practice you heard about elsewhere applies.

Also test things while you are still in the mood to be thorough: every tap for pressure and drainage, the hot water, every plug socket, every light, the extractor fan, the toilet, the windows and their locks, and any balcony door. Report anything faulty in writing on day one. In writing means email or a message you can retrieve, not a conversation in the lift.

Read the lease properly — especially these parts

Several provinces have a mandatory standard lease form, which is a genuine protection because it makes the terms predictable and limits what a landlord can bolt on. Others do not. Either way, the following clauses decide how your year actually goes.

• What is included in the rent. Heat, water, electricity, internet, parking and appliances may each be included or not, in any combination. This single question changes the real cost of the flat more than anything else in the document.
• The term and what happens at the end. Whether a fixed term rolls into a month-to-month tenancy automatically or requires action, and how much notice each side must give.
• Rules on guests, pets, smoking and alterations. Including whether you may put a nail in a wall, which sounds trivial until you want to hang anything.
• Who handles maintenance, how you report a problem, and what the emergency contact is at two in the morning when a pipe fails.
• Whether tenant insurance is required, which is increasingly standard, and whether proof must be provided before you take occupancy.
• Subletting and assignment, which matters far more than you think if your circumstances change.

If a clause in your lease conflicts with the province's tenancy law, provincial law generally governs regardless of what you signed. That is not licence to ignore the document — it is a reason to know your province's rules, which the tenancy authority publishes in plain language.

Heating: the question that defines your winter bills

South Africans have no instinct for this, because at home the seasonal energy question is a mild one. In Canada it is the difference between a manageable January and an alarming one.

Find out three things. Is heat included in the rent, or billed to you? What actually heats the place — electric baseboards, a gas furnace, a boiler with radiators, or a heat pump — because the running costs differ substantially. And who controls it: a thermostat in your unit, or a building system where you get what the building gives you.

Buildings with central heating often run on a seasonal schedule, which is why a cold snap in early autumn can find you shivering in a flat whose heating has not been switched on for the year yet. Ask, before you are cold.

Laundry, parking and storage

Laundry. In-suite laundry is the gold standard and costs more in rent. Otherwise you are using a shared laundry room, which may take coins, a card or an app — find out which before your first load, and find out where the nearest machine is if the building's is often occupied. Some buildings restrict laundry hours.

Parking. Confirm whether your spot is included or a separate monthly charge, where exactly it is, and whether it is underground or exposed — which matters for snow clearing and for whether you need to dig your car out. Ask how visitor parking works and what the rules are, because towing from private lots is enforced far more aggressively than most newcomers expect.

Storage. Many buildings provide a storage locker, often in the basement. Get the locker number, get the key, and go and look at it. Do not store anything that would be ruined by damp or by a temperature swing, and check whether your tenant insurance covers contents held outside the unit itself.

Tenant insurance, before you move in

Many leases now require it and will want proof before handing over keys, so arrange it in advance rather than on the day. Beyond the lease requirement, the liability portion is the part that actually matters — if a bath overflows or a kitchen fire spreads, the claim from the units below can be far larger than the value of everything you own.

Take an inventory as you unpack — photographs of anything valuable, serial numbers, receipts — stored somewhere that is not only on the laptop sitting in the flat.

The utilities handover

Whatever is not included in your rent needs to be transferred into your name, and the transfer should happen on your move-in date rather than after it. Two failure modes to avoid: arriving to a flat with no electricity because the previous tenant's account closed, and being billed for a period before you occupied the place.

Work through this in the week before you move.

Newcomers with no Canadian credit file are sometimes asked for a deposit by utility or telecoms providers. It is normal, it is usually refundable after a period of good payment, and it is another reason to start building a credit file early.

The building's own logistics

Apartment living in Canada comes with conventions that are not obvious from outside.

• Book the elevator. Most larger buildings require you to reserve the service lift for a move-in slot, sometimes with a deposit, and moving without a booking can mean carrying a sofa up eight flights or being turned away entirely.
• Learn the entry system. The enterphone or buzzer, how visitors reach you, how deliveries work, and where parcels are left. Parcel theft is real in some buildings.
• Find out how rubbish and recycling work. Canadian municipalities separate waste more finely than most South Africans are used to — recycling, organics or green bin, and general waste, with rules about what goes where and which days things are collected. Getting it wrong is a minor social offence and occasionally a fined one.
• Ask about snow. Who clears the walk, the entrance and the car park, and whether you are responsible for any part of it. In some ground-floor and townhouse rentals, clearing the walk within a set time is your legal obligation to the municipality.

The first-week purchases

An empty Canadian flat generally comes with a fridge and a stove — which surprises South Africans in a good way — and often little else. Window coverings may or may not be there. Light fittings usually are, bulbs sometimes not.

The list that makes a flat liveable in the first days, before the shipping container or the proper furniture arrives:

• Bedding — mattress or air bed, sheets, pillows, and a duvet warm enough for the season you have landed in
• Towels, toilet paper, soap, and a shower curtain if the bathroom has a bath
• A kettle, a pan, a pot, plates, mugs, cutlery, a knife, a chopping board, a bottle opener
• Cleaning basics, a bin and bin bags, and a broom or a cheap vacuum
• Extension cords and power strips, because outlets are never where the furniture is
• A torch, a basic tool kit and a tape measure
• Curtains or temporary blinds if the windows are bare
• A humidifier, if the heated indoor air is doing unpleasant things to your family's noses and skin — a very Canadian purchase that nobody warns you about

Second-hand marketplaces, community groups and thrift chains are entirely normal in Canada and will furnish a flat for a fraction of retail. Buying used here carries none of the stigma some newcomers expect.

The short version

Photograph everything before the boxes arrive and get the condition report in writing. Read the lease for what is included, who controls the heat, and what the notice terms are. Arrange tenant insurance before key handover. Transfer the utilities for the move-in date, not after. Book the lift, learn the bin rules, and find out who shovels the snow. Then buy bedding, a kettle and a shower curtain, and worry about the sofa later.

For anything about your rights — deposits, notice, repairs, rent increases, what a landlord may and may not do — go to your province's residential tenancy authority. They publish it themselves, in plain language, and it is the only version that is actually authoritative for where you live.