Whether it’s your first time moving into a dorm room or your last, making your space feel like home is essential to a great college experience. Everyone has their own ways of making their dorm room feel homey whether that means trying to mimic the feel of home or making it your own home away from home. However, if you’re looking for a few tips to make that first move in or last move in extra homey than you’ve come to the right place!
There is not a single house you can walk into that isn’t going to have at least one family photo in it. No matter what kind of family it is! In your house somewhere there is a photo of your family. If you’re able to make a copy of it and hang it in your dorm room somewhere.
Or try the alternative, which is something I did my freshman year of college. Take a new photo of or with each of your family members (pets included!), and make a collage board. It helps keep the homesickness at bay, and makes it feel like you’re your family is a little closer to you no matter how far away you may be from them.
The photos you bring with you to your dorm room don’t have to be just family though. They can also be photos of your friends back home (gotta have that best friend pic), or you can make a space in your dorm room for photos you take with new friends at college. A cork board and push pins usually do the trick when making a place to hang photos if they’re polaroids or even if they’re just printed on plain paper.
On the topic of dorm room wall hangings, posters are another perfect example of making your dorm room feel like home. Just because you’re an adult now doesn’t mean you still don’t have posters hanging in your room back home. If you’re going to college why leave them at home?
Make your dorm room feel like your room at home and take your posters with you! Your posters may not be in the same place in your dorm room because chances are you’ll probably be sharing it with someone, but seeing your favorite musician or fictional character on a poster will be familiar to you and might make you feel more secure.
Remember to think about how much space you’ll have on your dorm room walls, and don’t feel like you have to take all of your posters. Besides, when you go home for Thanksgiving or winter break you don’t want your bedroom at home to look completely barren, do you? For fall semester bring your favorite posters, and then as time goes on you can swap them out for other ones back home or even swap them for new ones you might collect too!
Just make sure you have a secure way to hang them that isn’t going to ruin the poster or your dorm room wall. From my experience, don’t use regular tape. Your posters will fall on you in the middle of the night.
Now before any claims of this being childish are thrown, hear me out. Nearly everyone I know has grown up with a favorite stuffed animal and I’m willing to you still have yours. (I know I still have mine!) Just because you’re an adult now doesn’t mean that you can’t have stuffed animals in your dorm room.
They’re comforting to see if not to hold because they’ve more than likely been with you your whole life. I’ve had my favorite stuffed animal, a brown dog with floppy ears, for as long as I can remember. I’m sure in your experience it’s the same, or at least similar.
Either way, your stuffed animals hold value to them. Whether it was because your parents got it for you for your birthday, your significant other won it at a carnival, or your best friend gave it to you as a going-away present. And if anyone wants to make fun of you for having a stuffed animal then just remember this: they don’t get to hold a Stitch plushy (if you have one) while watching a scary movie with friends and you do.
Let’s deviate from things that make your dorm room feel like home, and move towards making your dorm room into your home. Going to college and having a blank (sometimes bland) dorm room gives you the opportunity to make it your own and that includes the bed.
Finding a color scheme or an aesthetic that you find pleasing is the first step in finding the perfect bedding. For me, it was various shades of grey with white detailing, and my reversible quilt offers two different patterns for me to choose from! For you, it might be navy and gold, or red and yellow! Either way, the colors should be pleasing to you and should make you want to hop in bed and relax at the end of the day.
I call them knick-knacks, others call them trinkets, but whatever you call them they’re still yours. Whether they be POP! figures, little dragon statues, or tiny plush teenage mutant ninja turtles that sit on top of your TV; you have knick-knacks. They’re something that you’ve collected and can call your own, and you know for a fact that wherever you end up it’s likely that they will too.
Your knick-knacks may not remind you of home, but they’ll make your dorm room feel like your own home. Simply because they’re a part of you, and there’s some reason that you’ve kept them all this time. Decorating your new space with objects that are familiar or have sentimental value to you will make that new space feel comfortable and homey.
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