See that ridiculous excuse for a bedroom pictured above? The unmade bed, the stacks of books, the unorganized electronic devices and extension cords that are just BEGGING to be tripped over? The obsolete XBOX? The mismatched furniture? The cheap plastic bedside chest of drawers that I've had since my dorm years? Hey, you wanna live there? No, seriously, it's great. I swear. Fully furnished. You can keep ALL my Ikea furniture.

Yup, that's my room - if you think that's bad, you should see my living room. In fact, if you want to see my living room, just look below the jump. But this is what I'm having to work with in the process of subletting my apartment - taking frantic pictures of unmade beds in the pursuit of wooing some hapless naif into paying a large sum of money to live there despite the many vagaries of my most humble domicile: the dusty windowsills, shrieking showerhead, linting carpet, and one menacingly creaky toilet.

But the light is good, and the location isn't bad: on a good day when traffic is favorable, UCLA is fifteen minutes away, Beverly Hills twenty, and I can get to Hollywood in about a half an hour. (The traffic flow works with you when you drive east in the morning, west in the evening).

Although, things are actually going well on the subletter front. We're corresponding with an Italian scholar who will be visiting UCLA this summer to do some work on film, Hollywood culture, and modernism - pretty cool stuff, and as my roommate reflects, "he doesn't seem scary.".

The boyfriend and I also tried to have the big "budget" conversation last night to prepare for moving in with each other's wallets as well as each other's lives. As it happens so often with the two of us, though, we got carried away talking about a million other things and never managed to get around to topics like splitting bills and mutual savings goals. We did come clean to each other about our respective debt loads: I've got credit card debt that I'm gradually paying off at a low rate, and he still has student loans and car payments to make. Overall, though, we both have excellent credit and we seem to share similar priorities when it comes to spending. In fact, this morning's conversation over AIM was pretty typical of our ability to confer about big purchases:

Him: Check it out - EB Games has the Wii in stock, but you've got to buy it in a bundled set.
Me: That's a great deal, honey! But that's $500 you could be using to cover a security deposit.
Him: A security deposit will be way more than that...
Me: It's definitely pretty cool, I mean, you get the new Legends of Zelda with it, AND an extra controller...but you can probably wait. Since you've got seven other consoles and all.
Him: xoxoxoxo. :)

Anyway. Here are a few links to some of the resources I've been scouting out, as well as the best suggestions from LAist readers, to help make YOUR move easier, cheaper, and even, I dare say, a constructive and revealing experience.

Delancey Street Moving Company – not much of a web presence, but they get rave reviews over at watchdog website movingscam.com, and apparently they employ people who are looking to get a second chance at life - sounds like a good deal to me. I'm going to call them tomorrow to doublecheck prices and get a feel for the company.

Sabbaticalhomes.com - We found our potential subletter through this site, which allows professors, scholars, graduate students, and even non-academics to barter with each other for summer lodging in locales as exotic as Italy, New Zealand, Finland, and Argentina.

The Motley Fool: I've been turning to these online finance wizards to do research on credit cards, personal finances, and budgeting for couples. They've got lots of nice, simple print-out worksheets for organizing your spending, but more online interactivity - like spreadsheets and calculators - would be even more helpful.

Serious apartment-hunting begins June 1st. I am determined to find a place that is all at once convenient, cheap, and beautiful. Then and only then we can worry about all the past-due library books.

Photos by cmeathrell via flickr.