You Just Bought Your First Home in LA — Here’s Your Move-In Checklist

Escrow closed. Keys are in your hand. Congratulations. Now comes the part nobody puts in the home-buying fantasy: actually getting your stuff into the house.

Moving into your first home in Los Angeles isn’t always as simple as backing a truck into the driveway and carrying boxes through the front door. A condo may require a reserved elevator and a Certificate of Insurance. A street in Koreatown may have nowhere to put a truck. A house in the Hollywood Hills may have a road that looks perfectly normal on Google and considerably less normal when you’re trying to drive a moving truck up it.

Then there’s electricity. Water. Gas. Parking. Street sweeping. Suddenly the keys feel like the easy part.

Here’s a practical moving checklist for first-time home buyers who have made it through escrow and are now trying to get from “we own this place” to “we actually live here.”

Your Condo Has Rules

A first home in LA doesn’t necessarily mean a detached house with a driveway and a garage waiting politely for your truck. It might be a condo. And condos have rules.

Some buildings require you to reserve a freight elevator before the move. Others restrict moving to specific hours or days. Your building may also require the moving company to submit a Certificate of Insurance, or COI, before the crew is allowed past the lobby.

GMS confirms that it provides COIs when buildings require them. We ask our customers to send over the building’s requirements so the certificate can be prepared correctly. On some LA-area moves, we also coordinate elevator reservations and building requirements ahead of the move.

This is one of those things you want to handle while you’re still excited about the house. Not at 7:45 a.m. on moving day.

Call the HOA or property manager a week or two before the move. Ask about the elevator. Move-in hours. Loading area. COI requirements. Deposit. Access codes. Whatever strange little rule your building has developed over the years.

There will probably be one.

Figure Out Where the Truck Is Going to Sit

LA parking is already a minor urban sport. Now add a moving truck.

In DTLA, West Hollywood and other dense neighborhoods, the problem isn’t necessarily getting the truck to the address. It’s finding enough curb space to actually unload it. And no, putting your hazards on does not transform a parking violation into a moving permit.

LADOT has procedures for temporary no-parking signs and related street-use requests, and temporary restrictions are enforced. The city directs residents to LADOT for temporary no-parking sign questions and requests.

So if you need to reserve curb space, don’t wait until the truck is already there. Check the street. Read the signs. Figure out whether the location falls under a Preferential Parking District, an oversize-vehicle restriction or another posted restriction. LADOT notes that oversize-vehicle restrictions can apply to vehicles over 22 feet long or over 84 inches high during specified overnight hours, which can matter with a full-size moving truck.

And look at the actual curb.

Red means no stopping. Yellow is for commercial loading under specific conditions. White is passenger loading. Green is short-term parking. A moving truck doesn’t get to reinterpret the colors because it’s having a busy day.

Turn On the Utilities Before You Need Them

Walking into your first home and discovering there’s no electricity is a remarkably effective way to make a celebration less celebratory.

Start early.

For homes inside the LADWP service area, arrange water and electricity service with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. LADWP allows residential customers to start service online, by phone or in person. Gas is separate. If the house uses natural gas, set up service with SoCalGas.

Then there’s internet. Spectrum. AT&T. Whatever actually serves the address. Don’t assume that because your current apartment has internet, the new house can have it tomorrow morning. Technician appointments can fill up, especially around weekends and the beginning or end of a month.

If you don’t want to be one of those guys searching “first home move-in checklist LA” at 2 a.m. online after something goes wrong, handle utilities roughly one to two weeks before moving day.

You want the refrigerator running when it arrives. You want lights. You want Wi-Fi. Small luxuries. Suddenly enormous.

Hillside Houses Are Their Own Species

Silver Lake. Echo Park. Hollywood Hills. Bel Air. Some streets climb, twist, narrow and then apparently decide they have done enough and become a driveway. The house may be perfectly accessible by car. That doesn’t mean a full-size moving truck can comfortably reach the front door.

Where large trucks can’t make the approach we use smaller vehicles, transferring belongings to the main truck at an accessible staging point. We always check the approach, turning radius, grade and access before the move.

The right question to ask before booking is “Can your truck physically reach my house?” Not “Do you serve Hollywood Hills?” Those are different questions. Give the movers the exact address. Mention narrow streets, steep driveways, gates, private roads, tight turns and anything else you already know is weird.

A house with a gorgeous hillside view can also have a driveway designed by someone who apparently hated moving companies.

Plan for that.

Traffic and Street Sweeping

Los Angeles traffic doesn’t care that you just bought a house. It will happily turn your carefully scheduled 9 a.m. move into a 10:40 a.m. arrival if you decide to cross the 405 at the wrong time.

If the move requires crossing the 405, 101 or another major bottleneck, look at the route and timing rather than assuming Google Maps will solve everything. Then check the new street. Street sweeping schedules and posted restrictions still matter. StreetsLA publishes route information, and the city has specific sweeping schedules by day and street.

This is particularly easy to miss when you’re new to the neighborhood. You’re unpacking. You’re assembling a bed. You’re trying to remember which box contains the coffee. Meanwhile, the street-cleaning sign has been sitting there all week explaining exactly what is about to happen to your truck.

Read the signs before moving day. Actually look at the curb too.

Your First LA Home Move-In Checklist

A week or two before the move, have these handled:

• Ask the HOA or property manager about move-in hours, elevators, loading areas and COI requirements
• Send the moving company any building rules or forms
• Check parking restrictions on the new street
• Arrange temporary no-parking signage if required
• Start LADWP water and electricity service
• Arrange SoCalGas if needed
• Book internet installation
• Tell the movers if the house is on a steep or narrow hillside street
• Check the route and avoid the worst traffic you can reasonably avoid
• Read the street-sweeping signs at the new house

Before you finalize the move, check our local moving services and get the actual moving details into the quote. The more the movers know about the house before the truck arrives, the fewer surprises there are for everybody.

Especially you. You’re the one who just bought the house, after all.