Tool-
I've had some stretches of time where I've lived with girlfriends, and I'd give you the following recommendations - the first you can't do, since you've already discussed it, but the rest you can (I'll also add it to the article queue and get a proper article up on it at some point):
1.) Don't plan far ahead in the future - just ask her if it's cool if you can crash with her and tell her if she needs you out at some point, just to give you a few days' notice, OR, if you want her moving in with her, just let her come over more and more whenever she wants, let her leave stuff at your place and don't throw it out (which you'll want to do with small things she leaves behind if you DON'T want her getting too settled in), and eventually when her lease expires or she's fighting too much with her roommate just wait until she asks if she can just stay with you and tell her, "I guess that's okay, so long as you [whatever your most important rules are - respect that I need to work a lot, and either won't be home, or will be but need to be left alone, is one of mine]."
2.) Preferably get a 2-bedroom, one room that's both of your bedrooms, and one room that's your office. You need a place where you can go, shut the door, and be in peace - maybe have a bed in your office too, that way if there's whatever reason the two of you are fighting and/or you just don't feel like going to bed with you too, you can just tell her you're sleeping in your office, and she can decide to come in to you when she wants to make up. Also, I date a lot of messy women for some reason, so... it's nice having ONE place in the apartment if you're staying with a girl where everything is clean, orderly, and you know where it is and can get it in half a second, instead of spending 5 minutes looking for anything you want to use and finally locating it under a pile of clothes or stuffed into the last place you would ever look for it.
3.) Be lazy. Even if you're the neat one, household chores will tend to get done on their own if you wait for them to happen long enough. If you can afford it, have a maid service come once a week or so for a few hours to tidy up, that way your girl won't have to feel like she's the housewife TOO much if she doesn't want that role, and you can still have a place that isn't a complete pigsty.
4.) Train her to initiate sex. This is easier to do if you have a really important mission in your life that is way more important to you than your relationship is - you'll be transmuting the better part of your sexual energy into work output, and won't worry about sex a whole lot. Most girls aren't used to being the initiators at first, so you have to encourage them: "I'm REALLY busy, and I transmute a lot of my sex energy into work energy, and I'm always thinking about my personal projects - if you start feeling horny, you have to let me know it, otherwise you're going to be going insane and I'm going to be happily working away at whatever my tasks for the day are. I can perform whenever you need me to perform - sex drive is not a problem - I'm just usually putting most of that into work, and I need you to let me know when it's time for sex when you want me to deliver." And then, when she comes into you: "You need to turn me on... here, I'll show you how. Strip your clothes off... yeah, like that. That's sexy as hell. Put your mouth on me. Take my cock out and rub your naked pussy all over it."
5.) If you're both at home, encourage her to knock on your door when she needs sex or needs to talk... but not TOO much. You don't want constant interruptions, but you don't want her to feel like she's got to suppress herself, either (which leads down the road to resentment). So tell her if she has something she needs to talk about or do with you, it's okay to knock on the door and come in.
6.) Stress over and over and over again in the beginning how important it is for you to do your work. When you're first living together, most people (girlfriends, male friends and roommates... everyone, just about) do not realize how much free time or how little free time you have, and they will gradually try to take up more and more of your time because you're a cool person who's good conversation and good company and they enjoy being around you. You MUST be able to 1.) draw the line, and say, "All right, well, I have to get back to work now," and 2.) you must stress again and again how important it is that you work, and communicate this in a way that THEY can wrap their heads around - most people have unseemly amounts of free, unproductive time that they want to spend chit-chatting or lounging around on the sofa watching reality TV or just generally being lions on the savannah resting between their kills or pigs in the mud hanging out between matings and rooting for food, and unless you're able to explain to them, "I realize it may seem like I'm just hanging out when I'm in the office because I'm always relaxed and I try to make a lot of time for you, but I really do have a LOT of work to do, and it is VERY important that I do it - it's how I pay the bills, it's how I'm able to live the kind of life I live and you are too, and it's crucial for me to build what I need to build to do the things I want to do with my future. My work is very, very, very important to me. You're important to me too - but work HAS to come first, because without it, nothing else is possible."
If you're not working on your own thing, some of these may not be as applicable, but I don't much know how regular people without important projects for them live their lives together. I suspect this is actually a big reason why men these days spend so much time doing housework and being "equals" with women - they're working, the woman's working, and then they're both at home at the same time, and they really ARE equals - neither of them is doing anything more important or more demanding than the other.
In that light, my last recommendation would probably be this:
7.) Make absolutely, positively, deafeningly certainly SURE that you have some sort of project you're building and working on by the time you move in with a girl - some overriding purpose for your life that trumps all others - that is going to prevent you from sinking into the normal apathetic "we're just living together like a couple of equals" sit-on-the-couch-and-watch-TV-all-night lifestyle that 99% of couples living together fall into. I can tell you very honestly that the women I've lived with - who work HARDER for me, get LESS face time with me, and have LOWER equality with me, are way, WAY happier than the laid back, face time replete, fully equal partners of the male friends I have.
They meet a girl I'm staying with for a while, and say, "Wow... she seems really happy!"
I meet their girlfriends, whom they live with and dote on and treat like princesses, and it's, "GodDAMN that girl is miserable."
Women will fight for less work at home, and more face time with you, and more equality with you... but if they get those things, they won't long value them, and won't long value YOU.
Remember that respect is important above all, and that you must have something greater than your relationship if you are to maintain it.
Women know when they're your #1 thing, and when they become it, you quit being THEIR #1 thing.
And, when you do get disrespect in the home - clamp down on that like a BEAST. Demand that she tell you why she's saying XYZ thing, and keep insisting she tell you why she's disrespecting you, and give her the silent treatment if she won't. Go shut the door in your office and wait for her to crack. Sometimes this will take days... and if you aren't fine with breaking up with her, and even EXCITED at the prospect of being single, you will crack before she does, and then your goose is cooked and you end up like one of my friends with miserable live-in girlfriends.
Win every drama battle with her, and show her through example that causing drama with you only results in her losing power to you and submitting to your will. The drama dries up pretty quickly after this. She creates drama? You escalate. She creates? You escalate. She must always back down first. This is the opposite of how most men deal with women.
Alternatively, when you notice she's DOWN emotionally, you must give her some attention, find out what's causing it - the real ROOT of the problem - and address it.
If she's down too much, try taking a daytrip or a week-long trip with her somewhere to break her routine and see if that gets her spirits back up - if it doesn't, break up, because a woman who's always down will drag you down there with her.
Never have sex with her on a day you've fought. Makeup sex is tempting, but it unconsciously trains her to associate tons of drama with amazing sex. You don't have to be sneaky; you can tell her outright: "The brain forms connections, and I don't want your brain making the connection that causing drama leads to great sex, so we can't have sex today. We can have sex TOMORROW - we can do it first thing in the morning even. But sex today is off the table, because we fought today."
The opposite lesson ends up being engrained in her head - fighting leads to no sex. She'll soon begin to realize that what she wants with you when horny is honey, not vinegar.
Aside from days you're fighting, try to put out whenever she wants sex, even if you're tired, you had diarrhea that day, you popped a ligament doing bench presses... whatever. Turning her down occasionally is okay, but if you reject her too much, she'll start to not want to initiate, or won't bother, and instead will keep her sexual energy bottled up, building resentment against you, which she'll unleash in a hurricane of drama over something stupid and insignificant or, if the relationship gets REALLY rocky, possibly turn loose on the nearest attractive male she stumbles on.
Keep the sex good, but it doesn't always have to be amazing. Try to give her really standout, amazing, curl-your-toes-OMG-it's-good sex at least a couple of times a month, though. If you do it too much, she'll get too addicted to sex, and then you'll never get anything done because you'll just be having sex all the time. Her emotions will also go haywire, and she'll get heavily attached to you, and also extremely jealous, possessive, and territorial... it's good for the sex to not be TOO good much of the time, with some great sex sprinkled in here and there when you're up for it.
Don't be afraid to say 'no' to romantic comedies. There's no reason a man needs to watch those flicks.
Chase