Moving in

Moving Into a Prague Apartment - A Handyman Checklist

Published July 19, 2026 · Manžel Praha

Moving into a new apartment in Prague - especially if it's your first place in the city - usually comes with a list of small jobs that need doing before it actually feels livable. Flat-pack furniture to build, things to hang, and sometimes a place to childproof. Here's a practical rundown of what expats typically need sorted in the first week or two, plus how booking and communication actually work if you're not fluent in Czech.

Assembling flat-pack furniture

IKEA and similar flat-pack furniture is the single most common move-in job - wardrobes, beds, desks, shelving units. It's straightforward work, but a full apartment's worth of furniture adds up to real hours, so it's worth batching everything into one visit rather than booking a separate callout per item.

Mounting on brick or panel walls

This is the part that catches a lot of newcomers off guard. Prague housing is mostly one of two wall types: older prewar buildings with solid brick (cihla), and postwar panel-block apartments (panelák) with dense reinforced concrete walls. Neither takes a screw the way drywall does. Panel walls especially need a hammer drill and the correct masonry anchor for whatever you're hanging - a shelf, curtains, or a mounted TV. Get this wrong and things come off the wall, sometimes taking chunks of plaster or paint with them. It's a five-minute job with the right tools, and a much bigger problem without them.

Childproofing

For families moving in with young kids, the same wall-mounting skill applies to safety, not just decoration: anchoring tall furniture and TVs to the wall so they can't be pulled over, fitting cabinet and drawer locks, and covering exposed outlets. It's a small amount of work that's worth doing before the first week is over rather than after something happens.

Other things that come up around move-in

A few other jobs tend to surface once you're actually living in a place rather than just viewing it: curtain rails and blinds that need hanging, doors or windows that don't seal properly and let in drafts, a wobbly shelf left by the previous tenant, or a tap that needs replacing. None of it is urgent on its own, but it's efficient to fix all of it in the same visit as the furniture assembly.

How booking works

Booking doesn't require navigating a Czech-language form or a call center. You can send a short message describing what needs doing - a couple of lines is enough, a photo helps if something's hard to describe - or call directly. You'll get a reply with a scope of work and a price estimate before anyone comes to your apartment, so there's no ambiguity about cost going in.

Communication in English

You can book, describe the job, and get a price confirmed entirely in English - by phone or by message. There's no language barrier to work around, and no need to have a Czech-speaking friend translate for you. If it's easier to send a couple of photos of what needs fixing than to describe it in words, that works too.

Planning your first-week list

The most efficient approach is to make one list rather than calling separately for each item: furniture to assemble, things to mount, anything that needs childproofing, plus any small repairs left by the previous occupant. Since the callout fee is flat, handling it all in a single visit is generally more cost-effective than spacing it out over several bookings. For a sense of what a typical move-in visit costs, see the pricing breakdown - and for a rundown of what's actually in scope, what a Prague handyman can (and can't) do covers it in detail. Most first-week jobs land somewhere between a couple of shelves and a full afternoon of assembly and mounting.