-Eric

Ah, New York. A city of glitz, glam, spacious apartments, well-coordinated wall art, and apparently no IKEA whatsoever.

Riiiight. Only the most upper of echelons can truly relate to the spacious accommodations, vintage furniture, and shady streets shown on screen. If more than 2 seasons of any given show feature a plot line focused on how poor/unemployed/down-on-their-luck its characters are, you know and I know that an end-of-the-hall broom closet is more believable than a balcony. No “rent control” is that good.
So which shows got it right? And who tried to trick us? Take a look and see.

Carrie Bradshaw’s Apartment: Sex and the City

Carrie’s well-known stoop alongside her shabby-chic kitchen and bedroom from Sex and the City. Images from: cherishtoronto on Flickr, eclecticinteririordesigngroup.blogspot.com, and sensationalcolor.com

Fictional location: 245 E 73rd Street, between Park and Madison
Actual location: 66 Perry Street, between Bleeker and 4th
East 73rd street actually looks something like this:

It’s got the red brick, but is lacking the staircase. Where would Carrie be without her stoop? Image from: Google Maps

Believability: A spacious one-bedroom with walk-through closet and bathroom and a full kitchen – sounds too good to be true, although her décor is not overtly ostentatious. A quick check of Padmapper’s apartments for rent on East 73rd street sets the average rental price at $3,000 per month. Coupled with Carrie’s job as a newspaper columnist (who couldn’t possibly make over $40,000 per year, right?) and her obsession with Manolo Blahniks, we give this set location a big, fat “Yeah Right.” Good thing it’s rent controlled…

Jerry Seinfeld’s Apartment: Seinfeld

The outside shot of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment is actually an apartment complex in Los Angeles. Inside, though, is as comfy and “decorated by a guy” as we remember it. Images from: voteprime on Flickr and dvdsetcollection.com

Fictional location: 129 West 81st Street
Actual location: 757 New Hampshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California

West 81st Street goes a little something like this:

Jerry Seinfeld lived on the actual West 81st Street when making his break into stand-up in New York. Image from: Google Maps

Believability: This one makes sense. Seinfeld’s income:amenities ratio is perfection. A successful stand-up comedian deserves a clean, roomy one bedroom on the Upper West Side. If Seinfeld the show was still running today, Seinfeld the character would have Ikea’d his apartment a bit more, but we love the 90s two-toned walls and mismatched furniture. With similar apartments on 129 West 81st Street coming in at around $2,000 per month, we applaud Jerry and Dave for keeping things realistic.

Monica Geller’s Apartment: Friends

The familiar façade and brightly-colored kitchen from Friends. How long do you think it took Monica to dust all her kitcheny knick-knacks? Images from: khgrace.nomadlife.org and the Friends NBC myspace page

Fictional location: Greenwich Village, Apartment 20
Actual location: The corner of Grove and Bedford, Greenwich Village

Believability: For a gal who spends the first several seasons vacillating between poor, unemployed, employed by a diner, and then poor again (didn’t she at one point have $127.00 to her name?) the line cook turned executive chef lived in some pretty sweet digs. Together with her roommates who were even less financially secure than she (Rachel, the barista who couldn’t make a latte, and Phoebe, who was a masseuse sometimes), how much could these gals really rake in? 30 grand a year? 35? 40?

Friends explains that the apartment is a hand-me-down from Grandma Geller, and thus rent-controlled at far less than market value, but honestly – when Padmapper gives similar New York apartments a monthly rent of $3,000 – 5,000, when did Grandma need to get her hands on this gem so that she could pass it on to Monica at the feasible rate of $200 a month?

Don Draper’s Apartment: Mad Men (Season 4)

The Waverly, built in 1928, is still standing today. Image from: kelly.frombrc on Flickr

Fictional location: 6th and Waverly
Actual Probable location: 136 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village

Believability: Always sticklers for accuracy, the guys behind Mad Men would want a building still standing to represent the home of newly-divorced Don Draper. A slew of “Maddicts” took it upon themselves to discover the real deal after Draper declares “6th and Waverly” to the cabby, and have determined 136 Waverly as where the Draper-magic happens.

A contemporary apartment in the Waverly features fresh, white-washed walls, as opposed to the 60s bachelor-pad vibe. Images from: stribling.com and thegothamist.com

While the current apartments boast better lighting than the grimy glow of Draper’s pad, today’s selling price for a one bedroom is a cool 769 thousand; Maddicts guesstimate Draper could have been sitting pretty for a few hundred dollars a month. Not too shabby for an ad executive with low expectations for interior decorating.

Liz Lemon’s Apartment: 30 Rock

Nothing like functional air-conditioner covers to show off a residence’s true potential. Inside, Liz Lemon’s apartment is cozy and comfy. Images from: smlhope on Flickr and youaremyfave.com

Fictional location: 160 Riverside Drive
Actual location: Right where they said it’d be

Believability: An A+ for Tina Fey & Co. Since 30 Rock is loosely based on Fey’s life as head writer for Saturday Night Live, she knows how to keep it believable. Available one-bedroom apartments around 160 Riverside Drive in the Upper West Side sit squarely at $2,000 per month, which seems entirely reasonable for a head writer raking in about 1.5 million every year. Lemon’s interior is not overly-decorative and no one is surprised when she can afford to buy it (plus the apartment next door) during the fourth season.

When you move into an apartment for rent, (found on PadMapper, naturally) every insurance broker in the country will try to tell you that you are absolutely, positively, a moron if you don’t have rental insurance. They use taglines like “Even renters are owners,” and “Own piece of mind with renters insurance.” But what does it really protect you from?

Many of the top insurers focus on selling Personal Property Protection, which covers the loss or damage of personal belongings like televisions, furniture, computers, clothing and jewelry. You might use this insurance if you weren’t paying attention to our crime map overlay and some joker broke into your apartment and swiped your MacBook Pro, or if you accidentally flushed your prized watch down the toilet. Most insurance companies will cover the belongings at replacement value, and lend protection to belongings outside of the home as well. That means, if someone breaks into your car and rips off your Ke$ha CD, it’s totally covered.

Insurance companies currently estimate the personal property value for a two-bedroom apartment is roughly $30,000. For most young adults entering their first college apartment, you might not need rental insurance because you just don’t have that much to lose. When I was in college, you could round up everything I owned at the time and it might total $2,000. And that’s including my iPod.

Since this is a well-known fact for the majority of renters out there, rental insurance agents try to sweeten the deal by including the following lesser-used coverage:

• Guest Medical Protection: This covers the cost of medical expenses like an ambulance ride if a visitor is injured inside the house for rent
• Liability Protection: Offers legal representation against judgments for incidences covered by the rental policy
• Reimbursed Living Expenses: Provides the cost for rental housing in the event that your property is deemed unlivable due to an environmental or structural disaster
• Discounted Multi-Line Coverage (Renters + Auto): Includes savings of up to 25% depending on what kind of property you’re currently renting

In the end, rental insurance is a financial lifesaver when you need it. Personally, I currently have rental insurance to protect against the somewhat likelihood of my fiancée losing her engagement ring. I live in an average Seattle house for rent, and rental insurance costs about $170 per year, which is a little more than $14 per month. I personally don’t really want to pay that much money for “peace of mind,” but making this bet isn’t a waste of money.

What updates, you ask?

Well, the info bubbles now have tabs, so it should be easier to discover the street view and walk score than when they were on the bottom bar of links on those windows (I still get suggestions to add street view, more than a year after adding street view).

The Info bubble, now with tabs!

The other one, which some have been asking for, is that PadMapper now works with some rudimentary keyboard controls:
-Up, Down, Left, Right: pan in the appropriate directions as they’re held
-Page up, down, home, and end: pan in bigger jumps
-+, – : Zoom in and out

There’s unfortunately no way to jump through markers, open favorites, save as favorite, and so on, but I figured it was extremely simple to do, and a start.

Hope you like the updates! Let me know if anything doesn’t work right, or if you liked the old way better and why, and so on. padmapper@gmail.com is still the best way to send feedback.

And I’ve got a big iPhone revision coming up soon, which contains some things that a lot of you have been asking for.

Eric

It can’t be stressed enough how important it is to first inspect your future house/apartment/condo before signing the lease. This is important not only in determining if you truly want to live there, but also in covering yourself so you are not charged with a slew of expenses upon moving out. Here are a couple things to always look for:

Mold

Mold is a curious thing. On one hand, it’s one of the reasons why we have delectable cheese. On the other hand, it can kill you, or at least make you feel very sick. Worst yet, it’s really good at hiding in places that you rarely check, until one day you move a piece of furniture only to discover a black carpet of death.
A lot of mold will grow along windows and tiling, and a large quantity of it can be an indicator that the place is poorly ventilated, which will likely mean ongoing mold problems for you. On top of that, bad ventilation means the place will be hard to keep heated, which can lead to an increase in your electricity bill. So as you inspect the place, make sure to look out mold or a lot of calking, as that tends to be an easy cover-up for mold infestation.

Leaks, faulty plumbing

Another thing to check for is the plumbing and whether all the faucets work properly. Try every faucet in the place, and flush the toilet just for good measure. You’ll want to make sure that there’s no water leakage, or that there is any clogging which could mean something is stuck in the piping.

Insects

Insects and pests can put a damper on moving in. Especially insects as irritating to deal with as bedbugs, which can not only live a whole year without food, but also spawn like crazy and are so small that they’re easy to miss. There’s the possibility that the previous tenant may have had an infestation and thought they had extinguished it themselves, except the little blood suckers merely went into hiding. Check areas with woodwork as well as the anywhere where there may be gaps in the walls (corners, etc.).

These are just a few of the things that need to be checked on before you make that final leap of faith and acquire your new home/apartment/condo. Obviously there are other small things to look into, so the best advice is to just take your time and thoroughly inspect the place before you put down that final signature.

First up, there’s a really simple, small version that’s just a badge and can be dropped in almost anywhere. If you’d like to show that you list on PadMapper, this would be perfectly fine. Just copy the following and paste it into the HTML of your blog or site…

<a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.padmapper.com” rel=”nofollow”><img src=”http://www.padmapper.com/images/PadMapperBadge.png” alt=”PadMapper Apartment Search”></img></a>

And that gives you something that looks like…

If you want to get really serious, there’s one that’s available directly on the site under the “Link” link in the filter box. If you copy the embed portion of that and paste it into your website, you’ll get something like this (hopefully less crunched horizontally so it can space out a bit):

View Larger Map, Powered by PadMapper Apartment Search

If you go to the site from PadLister, and it loads with just your listings showing, if you click that link and get the code, it will show just your listings on your embedded version on your site.

Welcome to a whole new world of PadMapper bling. It’s a wonderful place, isn’t it?

The year is 3010. Due to a population explosion, apartments have shrunk to the size of capsules. Interiors have become outlandish and uncomfortable. Your window? Tiny. Your balcony? It’s now part of the window. But that’s ok because evolution has phased out acrophobic and claustrophobic tenants. There are also no more three-toed sloths, but they were never that great anyway.

Presenting 22 futuristic apartments you need to see to believe.

Color is in; way in

Vernor Panto's Visiona II: A revolutionary and psychedelic design staged in 1970.

You might be wondering where the television is. And the computer. Those two people are the television and computer. Yeah, humans have made some significant upgrades. The woman who looks like she’s crying? She just watched a Youtube video. We never evolve out of Youtube.

Picture me rollin’

Experimental Rolling House Design by: The University of Karlsruhe in Germany. It's one giant cylinder sectioned into rooms. Photo: Neatorama.com

Put those “house on a hill” dreams to rest and upgrade your renter’s insurance. You’re going down.

Apartments Go Mobile

Metromorph moving balcony Concept by Roman Mistiuk. As seen in the movie Minority Report. Photo: Tuvie.com

In the future, people’s incessant need to always be moving will lead to movable apartments. Their answer will be the Metromorph, which turns into a balcony and scales the wall of your building. Subsequently, parking lots around the world will go out of business.

With space for two, the Metromorph has seats held by rotating arms and two giant doors that slide up and over the vehicle. If you’ve seen Minority Report, you’ve seen the Metromorph.

Taking the highrise to a whole new level

Avoid traffic with The Flying Apartment Concept. Fly to different continents while sitting on your couch. Designed by Dennis Inemansson. Scheduled for liftoff in 2060. Photo: Instablogimages.com

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. Oh wait – no it’s the flying apartment system. Just don’t. open. the windows.
Look for this on PadMapper apartment listings in 2060.

Star Trek Becomes Reality

Tony Alleyne modeled his studio in Hinckley, Leicestershire, UK to look like the inside of the starship Voyager from Star Trek: Voyager. Photo: Odditycentral.com.

The perfect place to host a Trek party. The problem is that you also have to live there the rest of the year.

Windows get weird; apartments float

Project Fudomae in Tokyo Japan where minimalism is in and apartments are tiny. Photo: FurnitureStoreBlog.com

This apartment was clearly designed during “Take Your Son to Work Week.”

The Citadel Floating Apartment Complex by WaterStudio NL in the Netherlands. Photo: DesignBoom.com

You said near the water. This apartment is in the water.

Can’t get more futuristic than white

Design by Romolo Stanco inspired by Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Small apartment with living area, open kitchen and bedroom with adjoining bathroom. Photos: DesignWarrior.net.

iApartment 4.0 was almost a great success. Too bad you can’t touch the stove on the lower-left corner. Bumper and utilities extra.

49 sqm apartment inspried by origami. Apartment located in Barcelona. Photo: BestHouseDesign.com.

This apartment looks amazing until you think about how many times the person who lives here bumps his or her head on that slanted ceiling above the bed. Or is that the couch?

Pop art marries modernism, designed by A.A. Studio. Photos: Dornob.com.

You know the story about the dead person who was buried beneath the floorboards? Yeah, these people were a bit more careless.

Weird Interiors

The "Lost House," an apartment with modern design located at Crinan Street in London. Designed by David Adjaye. Features a water garden and tricked-out home theater. Photo: BestHomeGallery

It’s a laser-lounge.

Photo from InteriorDesignIdeas.

In case you ever wanted your apartment to scream “I shop at Target.”

Get Cyberfied

The Pad, a representation of life in the future located in Business Bay, Dubai, UAE. Developed by OMNIYAT properties. Features: Clubhouse with oxygen bars, digital water environments, gym, suspended infinity pool, and more. Photos: CondoHotelCenter

Sure, the interior resembles a 70s bachelor pad. But this Dubai apartment is as high-tech as you can get. It’s called, “The Pad” and it’s the world’s first cybertecture apartment tower. Each apartment will have a virtual reality projection wall linking it to locations worldwide. That means you can see the New York City skyline in real time without ever leaving your living room.

The Pad concept also includes iArt, which allows you to switch that Andy Warhol painting to a Monet in a matter of seconds. And you can rotate your lounge 360-degrees to change your view.

We predict that in the future, no one will ever leave their apartment. Why would they?

The Turning Torso

Turning Torso: a skyscraper in Malmo Sweden developed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. Residents get to choose their view! Photos: Sweden.se

Welcome to the Turning Torso, a new apartment constructed in 2005 in Malmo Sweden. The name is….well, off-putting (who would want to live in a torso?), but the concept is super green and super cool. To save energy, this building features automatic LEDs, triggered by motion sensors.

There’s nothing like capsule livin’

Nakagin Capsule Tower, a mixed-used residential and office tower designed by Kisho Kurokawa, located in Tokyo, Japan. Photos: Wikipedia.org

Suddenly, your 500-square-foot studio doesn’t seem so small.

USM Container City, installed in London in 2001 at the Trinity Buoy Wharf in London developed by Urban Space Management. Photos: Container City.com

This apartment/office building, made out of shipping containers gives a new meaning to “humble abode.” The future of recycling is oh-so bright!

Warden 7, City in Space. Designed in the early 70s by Ricardo Bofill, located in Barcelona Spain.

Someone really messed up a game of Tetris.

Penthouses in a Polygon

Toyko Residence by Yasuhiro Yamashita. Photo: FreshHome

In the future, it’s no longer hip to be square. Apartments take on every shape. Imagine living in an octagon.

Cubic Houses – Rotterdam, Netherlands. Developed by Piet Blom in 1982. Concept: Each cube represents a tree to create a housing forest.

It’s transformer chic. Except it doesn’t transform. And you better hope your furniture sticks to the walls because that coffee table is going to slide.

Postmodern designs by renowed architect Edificio Mirador, located in Madrid.

In the future, you’ll have lots and lots of neighbors. Garantupartments become the norm. And living in a Lego is no longer a distant dream.

WoZoco Apartments in Amsterdam. Designed by MVRDV for elderly people in an area of Amsterdam that is threatened with loss of space, due to an increase in density. Photo: Ih3.ggpht.com

In 3010, apartments defy gravity. Eat it Newton!

The Urban Cactus. Designed by UCX Architects, located in Rotterdam. Features 98 residential units and the best balcony garden in the world.

Inspired by Pauly Shore’s epic film BioDome. Did we mention that the Urban Cactus is located in the cool, wet Netherlands? Nothing desert about it. Maybe that’s why it looks nothing like a cactus.

That’s a pretty humbling thought, especially if you try to imagine a million PadMapperers standing in a field.

Many of you have come in the recent past, as the word seems to have spread pretty quickly. Others have been using the site for over a year and are old salty PadMapper veterans, having just found your 3rd apartment in 6 months. I’d like to say thank you to all of you who have told your friends and made this hobby project into something that has some real-world impact. It’s always great to hear someone I know tell me that someone they know recommended PadMapper to them, and the emails that many of you send are amazingly motivating.

I hope PadMapper has made and continues to make your apartment hunts suck less. I’ve got some cool things still waiting up my sleeves. See you at 5 million.

All the best,
Eric

PS: I haven’t said this enough in recent email exchanges – I used to all the time – but… Tell your friends!

See how many boxes you need? Get cracking!

The problem with finding free moving boxes is that by the time you think to do it, it’s two days before The Big Move and you’re so desperate for packing materials that you end up spending 60 bucks on a Multi-Room Super Storage Pak from the local Save’n'Store.

Don’t worry. Your wallet can stay full on your quest for free moving boxes. But you’ve been warned: as soon as you start looking online for apartments for rent (with PadMapper, of course), you should also start looking for boxes.

Place to look: Craigslist

The ultimate free stuff resource. Go to your community’s Craigslist, click [For Sale], search for [moving boxes] in [free stuff] and you’ll have access to enough free moving boxes to build a castle of cardboard in your new backyard.

There are several other online resources for free (or really, really cheap) moving boxes:

• Freecycle.org: sign up for your community Freecycle and find free, used packing equipment
• Boomerang Boxes: you can buy used moving boxes for a song, and then sell them back if they’re still in good condition
• Freecardboardboxes.com: an affiliate of Boomerang Boxes that allows people in the same region to swap free boxes when needed
• U-Haul Exchange: U-Haul created a forum for movers and ex-movers to announce free boxes

Expert tip: Bring your own box cutters. There is nothing worse than driving 25 minutes to collect your bounty only to discover they have not been collapsed. Sorry, but 12 full-sized boxes will not fit in your Subaru Impreza, no matter how hard you try.

Place to look: Local Apartment Complex

Hone your stalking skills and scope out the apartment complexes in your area. As new tenants arrive, offer to take all their empty boxes off their hands as a “welcome to the neighborhood” gesture – heck, go ahead and help them get the couch up the stairs while you’re at it. Your good karma will pay out in cardboard.

No U-Hauls on the horizon? Leave your name and phone number with the landlord or apartment manager and let them know you’re on the lookout.

Expert tip: College campuses are also great places to find boxes. Your best bet is to go to the back entrance or loading dock of the university cafeteria and talk to the wait staff. They can likely hook you up.

Place to look: Retail Stores

Strip malls will provide a bounty of boxes. They are constantly receiving shipments of new goods, and new goods come in boxes – it’s as simple as that. You can even shop around for the boxes of your dreams: stop by Best Buy for all your electronics, Barnes and Noble for your books, etc.

Grocery stores and liquor stores receive shipments on a daily basis, and they usually just recycle the boxes as soon as they are unloaded. Both are known for being liberal with their box dispensing.

Expert tip: Chances are the 15-year-old check-out kid is not going to be able to help when you rush in asking “Boxes? You got boxes?” Rather, stop by the customer service counter, or talk to a cashier you’ve had before. If the manager is around ask her, rather than the new bag boy.

Place to look: Your Workplace

Pilfering boxes from the workplace is effective; it just takes a long time to get enough to pack up your entire life. If you start early, though, collect computer boxes, paper boxes, supply boxes (you get the picture) and soon you’ll have enough.

Expert tip: If the Apartment Hunting Gods are smiling upon you, your move will coincide with the hiring of a whole slew of new employees. New employees = new computers and chairs and desks = lots of boxes. Plan your move wisely.

Place to look: Dumpsters

Dumpster diving is definitely a touchy subject, especially because no one quite knows if it is legal or not. Either way, in most cases you could get into some hot water for trespassing onto a business owner’s private property. Ask the property owner before you start rifling through his or her trash.

Expert tip: Wear gloves.

Place to look: Your Friends

If each one of your friends gives you one free box, you’ll be set!

Expert tip: Have lots of friends.

UPDATE: Place to look: Recycling Centers

Thanks to historychic in the comments for this one – recycling centers should have cardboard boxes somewhere on the premises – might require some dumpster diving, though.

Boxed up and ready to go? Read up on moving scams to avoid shady circumstances. If anyone has any other tips to share, leave them in the comments!

Map of the crime rate in different areas of San Francisco - I don't want an apartment in the Tenderloin

If you’re looking for a cheap place to rent, chances are that you’ll have quite a few options in the shadier parts of town. If you’re moving to a new city, you might have no clue what the nice parts of town are vs. the shady parts of town.

For example, I recently moved to Silicon Valley, and I’ve always heard that Palo Alto was really nice. After all, it was the birthplace of Apple Computer and a bunch of other big companies, and a lot of very rich company founders live there. It turns out that that’s West Palo Alto that everyone’s singing praises about. East Palo Alto was actually the murder capitol of the US for a while pretty recently.

This cluelessness, which almost had me living in a former murder capitol, is why I’ve been working on something to show you what the crime rates of different areas of town are.

I’ve just rolled it out in San Francisco, and other cities should be forthcoming if the response is good. Red means high crime, green means low crime, yellow is in between, and blank is either extremely low crime or a lack of data (in SF it means very few crimes were reported in those areas). The labels in the picture above are hard to read, but the red dot in the middle of SF is the Tenderloin. Wikipedia even has a pretty large section about the crime of the Tenderloin.

To access the crime overlay, go to PadMapper for San Francisco apartments, go into the filters, open up “Super Secret Advanced Features”, and check on the “Crime Overlay” checkbox. It might take a bit to load, so don’t worry if it doesn’t appear immediately.

Alternately, you can just check out the crime map by itself.

And please let me know if you find it useful or stunningly unuseful by emailing me at padmapper@gmail.com. If you’re looking for an apartment to rent in San Francisco, it should be pretty helpful.

Moving day can be a mess...

No matter how much stuff you own, moving that stuff into a new apartment scores about a 9.5 out of 10 on the crap-I-never-want-to-do-ever-again scale. Finding a moving company is a big part of the hassle. Not only is it hard to trust other people with your prized collection of Ikea furniture, there are a number of people that have been hit with moving scams.

Not every moving company is bad, but there are enough shady moving companies that it’s worth being wary. Before you hand your stuff off, you should know a thing or two about the moving industry and what to look for when trying to spot a potential scam.

The Moving Industry in a Nutshell

Before 1980, I’m told that Americans generally had reliable moving companies. Since only a few companies legally moved goods across state lines, it was easy for the government to regulate the moving industry.

Things changed in 1980 when the moving industry deregulated with the Household Goods Transportation Act. The whole business turned upside down – interstate movers started issuing binding or “fixed estimates,” which led to price instability and ultimately opened the door for increased competition. Prices fell as was likely intended, but so did the quality of service.

The Rules of a Moving Scam

The most common moving scam involves a rogue moving company using a low non-binding estimate. After moving the goods, the company holds the cargo hostage by demanding inflated charges.

For example, let’s say you received an estimate for $1,000 to move your prized Hello Kitty collection from Seattle to your new apartment in San Francisco, and you sign the contract.

Two weeks later, the truck rolls up to your new apartment, but now the moving bill is $2,500 – What?! Even more bad news, the shady movers tell you they’re going to take your kitties and run if you don’t pay up.

These scams happen all the time, and there’s not much we can do about them, besides perhaps calling your representative. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) regulates the moving industry, but since they employ less than 20 people, watching over hundreds of moving companies is almost impossible to do very effectively.

How to Avoid Moving Scams

Here’s a few tips to avoid getting scammed during the big move, but you might not like some of the answers:

1. Just sell all your stuff and start fresh. No one really wants to put together another Ikea Malm, but it sounds a whole lot better than the great Ikea heist of 2010.

2. Move it yourself. It’s cheaper, and the only person to blame for damaging your stuff is yourself. Besides, loading your own U-Haul isn’t that bad… except when you have to drive cross-country in a U-Haul.

Note: Loading your own U-Haul doesn’t sound like a good idea? No worries, there are plenty of companies that will load it for you.

If you need to go with a moving company, here are some basic tips:

1. Get referrals from real estate firms. They deal with these movers all the time and they should have their favorites.

2. Beware of completely internet-based movers. It’s great if the moving company has a website, but make sure there’s a brick and mortar place of business for you to meet with them. This makes it much easier to track them down in the event of a problem, and it gives a door for the police to knock on as well.

Once you find a mover that passes your gut check, check their listing on the Better Business Bureau. There you can find out their full legal name, contact information and service grade.

Finally, right before you hand over your last worldly possession, ask for a booklet called “Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move.” Moving companies legally have to give you this information, and it’s a good sign they have their act together.

If you can find a moving company that passes all these tests, you should be all right. Keep your wits about you, though. Happy moving and good luck.