Dorm rooms are incredibly small, and college kids are incredibly messy. Put the two together and what do you get? Clutter. Lots and lots of clutter. This is something that you really can’t avoid while living in a dorm room, no matter how creative you are with your organization. You can stash most of your things away under the bed or in the closet, but there will come a time when you just have too much overflow to contain. What do you do then? You get creative. There are plenty of ways to make clutter look purposeful and even cool. You just have to think outside the box. Here are some tips to help you turn your messy dorm room into an artistic expression that people will be talking about.

Hang Stuff on the Walls

If you have a hard time finding space for your shoes or clothes, start hanging it up on the wall like art. No, this does not mean to cover your walls in thongs and boxer briefs. It just means that you may want to put your shirts, shoes, or pants on display as if they are pieces that people should look at. This gets the clothes off the floor, and it allows you to store your things away with ease. You can get as creative as you want with this, just as long as it looks like you meant to put stuff on the walls. You should be able to pull this off with a decent eye for design.

Create a Sculpture of School Supplies

Your textbooks will inevitably start to pile up in your room, so why not make a piece of art out of them? You could turn them into a topsy turvy pyramid of sorts that has papers scattered around it. As long as you keep everything functional, you could make a really funky piece of art for your dorm room. This saves you from having to find space for your bookshelf or cabinet because you can just leave your books on display. They will become a conversation starter, not a big pile of crap in your room.

Establish Organized Clutter

Sometimes all you need to do is organize your clutter to make it more presentable. You can buy personal organizers to hold your pencils, hair supplies, notepads, receipts, or anything else you need to organize. The clutter will still be there, but it will look well put together. I have an organizer on my desk that holds all of my office supplies. It is filled to the brim, but it looks nice because it is well organized. When people can see that there is a method to your madness, they will react positively to your clutter.

Cover with Class

If you cannot find a creative way to display your clutter, try to cover it. You could put decorative panels around your desk to shield it from the world, or you could try to hide everything in a special cabinet. If you have a desk with empty space below it, you could put a cloth on top to hide anything underneath. This may not be the most creative option in the world, but it does work. You just have to find the right cover for your needs.

Try to minimize clutter as much as you can, and then organize whatever is left over. I know this can be hard to do at times, but it will make a big difference in the experiences people have in your room. If you can make your space look like it is still clean and well organized in the end, you will have a great looking dorm room.

Keeping the memory of your family alive may be as simple as putting a picture of them on display in your dorm room. You could do something as simple as putting a photo in a frame, but perhaps you would like to have a slightly more unconventional display. Whatever your style may be, it can’t hurt to have one or two focal points on your walls that people talk about when they see your room. Listed below are a few creative ways that you could go about showcasing your photos. Use these ideas to create a unique photo display in your dorm room that you and your family can cherish for years to come.

Canvas Art

Have you ever thought about turning your family photos into actual works of art? You can get your photos printed on canvas, and they will look just like works of art. There are options to do this that can fit any price range, but this is a unique way to see your family photos without actually having them on photo paper. Canvas photos look more professional than traditional photos, and they can be framed just like pictures in an art gallery. Your family will surely love a display like this in your dorm room.

Family Collage

If you feel like getting crafty one day, you can use an assortment of family photos to make a unique collage in your dorm room. Simply get a piece of cardboard or something else to act as the backing of the collage and set out your pictures in random order. Then when you like what you see, you can put some collage glue on the back and front to seal the photos in place. This can be a fun family project that anyone can do, and it is guaranteed to be one of a kind.

Clothes Line

Photo displays do not always have to be professional. While it is a good idea to have some professional photo displays in your dorm room, you can also have some that are a bit out of the box. For instance, you can hang a string on a wall and use clothes pins to hold photos along it. You could also use this to display Christmas cards or rewards that your kids get at school, depending on your needs. All you have to do is see the creative purposes behind unexpected items in your dorm room.

Pots and Pans

You may not get a lot of cooking done in your dorm room, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t put out some pots and pans. Cut your photos to the size of the pots, and then you can display them on the bottom or inside (depending on the look you are going for). You could simply push them in for now, or you could actually put a sealant over them to seal them in for good. When you’re done, just hang them up on the wall next to your AIMS scholarship certificate.

Conclusion

Creating a unique display for family photos is a great way to show your loved ones how much you care. Whether you want photos printed on canvas or something else for your family, the memories you create through your displays will last a lifetime. Take the time to play around with some of the ideas above, and you will surely come up with something that suits all of your needs at one time. All it takes is a little creativity on your part and a good set of photos to put on display.

When you move into a dorm, you may only think about getting your bed, your clothes, your TV, and your microwave. Everything else is going to magically be there by way of the dorm fairies…right? Nope, that is not the case little ones. The fact is that you have to bring your entire life to your 10×10 dungeon – I mean dorm room – so you need to make sure you have everything you need before you leave home. There are a lot of items that you are probably going to forget, and then you’ll have to stretch your tiny living budget to accommodate for the missing items. Here is a list of some must-have dorm accessories that most people miss when they first go to college.

Vacuum

I know the idea of cleaning while you’re in college may seem totally absurd, but you are going to need to do it at some point in time. If you have carpet or a large rug in the room, you will need a vacuum to remove the rubbish. (I wrote that with a British accent, in case you couldn’t hear it through the words ). You can buy a small vacuum that will tackle the small area you’ll be living in. You don’t need something huge. For $20 or so, you’ll have a cleaning machine that will keep your dorm bug free – hopefully.

Curtains

You may not have more than one or two windows in your dorm room, but those windows will need to be covered at some point in time. My husband was ever-so-fortunate enough to be right next to the street light when he lived in the dorm, so he had a bright ass light shining into his room every night as he slept. Some simple curtains could have helped him avoid that whole situation, but he forgot to bring them from home. You can staple a sheet to the wall for a temporary solution, but you really need to think about some darkening curtains instead. That will make a big difference in your abilities to control light in the room.

Ear Plugs

You probably don’t use ear plugs at home now, but you will most likely need to in a dorm. Even dorms with noise restrictions tend to be noisy at night because of everyone moving around quietly. If you want to ensure that you get to sleep at a decent time, you will need some foam inserts to drown out the noise. I use these a lot whenever I work because I get distracted by noise outside my house. They are pretty darn effective at keeping the peace so you can concentrate, making them perfect for studying, sleeping, or meditation. You can buy a full pack of them for $2 or so, so you won’t have to spend a lot to get the peace you need for school.

Fans and Electric Blankets

Most dorm rooms don’t have ceiling fans, nor do they have independent temperature controls. If you get really hot in your dorm room, you will need a fan of some sort to cool you down. In the same light, you will need electric blankets to keep you warm if the room gets too cold. You just have to do whatever it takes to create a suitable environment for you to live in.

Make a list of the items you use on a day to day basis, and try not to forget any of them when you move into your dorm. That way you can have an enjoyable experience from the first day you arrive at school.

Fancify: (verb) to make fancy. A word I made up for the purpose of this article, just because I thought it sounded cool.

With the vocab lessons out of the way now, I want to talk about that boring old ceiling light that you probably have in your dorm room. This is the fate of just about every college student out there living in a dorm. There’s just a big dome light on the ceiling that has absolutely no design or personality to it. If you want to keep a theme running in your dorm room, you need to touch every part of it. That includes that stupid little light fixture. Listed below are some fun ways you may be able to spruce that thing up without necessarily spending a ton of money.

Chicken Wire

If you surround the light with chicken wire, you can use the fence-like pattern of the metal to hang stuff from. Make sure that you keep the chicken wire away from the light a bit to avoid excessive heat transfer. Then you can hang Christmas ornaments from the wire or long strands of beads and crystals. Basically you can turn your light into a chandelier without having to fork out the money for an actual chandelier. If you want to find a way to hang something quirky up, you could do that too. Mechanical pencils, CDs, book marks, and Coke bottles could all work if you got creative.

Suspended Window

Another cool way to liven up that boring dome light is to suspend a window underneath it. You can find an old-looking window at just about any second hand construction or design shop, and then you can use brackets to mount it from the ceiling. I have seen windows like this at a local Habitat for Humanity store, so you may want to see if you have something like that in your area. You could get creative and use some sort of stained glass, or you could just look for a standard window with standard window panes. Whatever the case may be, you could probably create a pretty badass light fixture with just an old window and a little labor.

Plastic Cups

I talked about a Sparkleball a few weeks ago, and this idea is sort of inspired by that. You could take some plastic cups and glue them all together to form a hemisphere. Then you could hang the dome over the light you have to emit light in a cool new way. You have to be careful not to get the cups too close to the light in case they start to melt. Worse comes to worse, you can take off the glass dome covering the light and just keep the light bulb inside. If you do this though, make sure you keep the glass dome somewhere safe and easy to access. That way you can find it when you move out at the end of the semester.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to learn how to become an artist just to make a cool light fixture for your dorm. There is no reason to have a boring ceiling light when there are so many easy things you can do with it. Take pride in your dorm room, and do whatever it takes to make it your own. If that means you have to take the time to hang chicken wire on the ceiling, so be it. The time will be well worth the ooos and ahhs you get whenever it gets done.