Nobody warns you about the toilet brush. You spend weeks agonizing over the perfect couch, and then it’s 11 p.m. on move-in night and you realize you have nothing to actually clean the toilet with. First apartments are like that  you’ll nail the big stuff and completely blank on five small things that end up mattering more.

So here’s the list, broken down room by room, with the stuff people actually forget flagged along the way. Buy the essentials before you move in, and let the rest trickle in over your first month. Your bank account will thank you.

Kitchen

You don’t need a full Williams Sonoma setup. You need it to function.

A real chef’s knife.