If you are heading to college for the first time this Fall, you will want to make your dorm room your own. Since they have to accommodate so many people with their different tastes and requirements, college dorm rooms are by necessity quite drab—prepare for grey curtains, non-descript carpeting on the floor, and furniture that’s minimalist but not in the fashionable ‘Scandi’ kind of way. Follow these tips to jazz up your new room and make it cozy—but check with your roomie first, of course!
1. A large bulletin board
Colleges can be funny about letting you hang or tack posters and other decorations on your dorm room walls—tac can leave greasy marks on the walls, nails create holes, and colleges understandably don’t want to splash out on repainting each dorm room every summer. A large bulletin board, such as this one from Office Depot, is the perfect way to be able to hang posters, pictures, and even your timetable in your room without provoking your RA’s wrath. Choose a board that is mounted through a couple of picture hooks—these will only leave tiny holes that you can easily cover up yourself with some paint at the end of the academic year. Plus, agreeing on posters you both like might be the perfect way to bond with your new roommate!
2. A bean bag
Bean bags are the best choice of furniture for a student: not only are they extremely comfortable and even washable, but they are also easy to transport from your freshman year dorm room back to your parents’ house for summer vacation and then on to wherever your sophomore year takes you. Choose a foam bean bag like the ones from Fombag, and you will never again have to choose between sitting on a stiff desk chair or spending all day on your bed!
3. Fairy lights
You might be used to thinking of them as Christmas lights, but who says that those cute strings of tiny lights have to be just for Christmas? Wind a string of lights around a lamp stem, use them to line your windowsill or frame the headboard of your bed with them, and your dorm room will quite literally light up with coziness. You can get a really long string of lights for cheap at The Christmas Light Emporium.
4. Picture frames
When you first go to college, it’s completely normal to miss your friends and family from back home. Picture frames are an excellent way to keep your loved ones close to you even when you have moved away—and then, as you make new friends at college, you can add more pictures to your collection! Many shops, such as Michaels, even sell collage picture frames, which might be a fun, money-saving way to cram pictures of everyone you love into one big frame. Put the frame on your nightstand, bookshelf, or desk, and you will save precious space on your bulletin board!
