Moving into your new dorm room is an exciting and somewhat scary venture. You get to know your new roommate, meet people on your floor, organize your room, and more. It’s important to remember that organizing your dorm room intelligently will have a very positive impact on your experience throughout the year, so it takes some thoughtful consideration in order to do it well. Here are 5 dorm room organization tips for college students.
- Initial Your Food Items
Your dorm room will most likely have a fridge or at least a mini fridge, and there’s nothing worse than getting in arguments with your roommate over whose milk is going sour, or whose jar of jam is in the door. The best way to limit confusion and make sure that everyone is throwing their food away in a timely manner is to start writing your initials on all of your food. You may even want to designate certain shelves or drawers to each roommate to make things as clear as possible.
- Use a Filing Cabinet
It doesn’t matter if you’re earning Villanova’s LLM tax online degree or your BFA in dance from UC Irvine, you are going to have a lot of paperwork to keep track of. In order to avoid losing assignments or having papers scattered throughout your dorm room, you’re going to want to get a small filing cabinet. You can use this cabinet to file all finished and graded assignments, any important personal documents, and anything else that you may need to keep on hand.
- Use Hooks
One of the best ways to keep clothes off the floor and from piling up on your bed and desk chair is to use hooks. You should have a couple of hooks on the inside of your room door and anywhere else that you can fit them. They can be used for jackets, scarves, hats, towels, or anything else.
When you live with someone else in a tiny dorm room, the last thing you want to do is stumble over clothes laying around everywhere. Plus, you’re going to need to run in and out of your room all the time, so it will be incredibly helpful to have everything you need easily within arm’s reach.
- Limit Accessories
You may have had a lot of accessories and trinkets located in various places throughout your room when you lived with your parents, but you definitely don’t want to have that same vibe in your dorm room. Not only will they contribute to clutter in your small space, but you will also have people in and out of your room all the time. In which case, there’s a high likelihood that these valuables will get stolen or broken. So be sure to keep your sentimental trinkets to the bare minimum.
- Install Shelves
One of the most space efficient ways to store a lot of your belongings is to install shelves in your room. You can use shelves to hold your books, dry foods, jewelry, etc. You wouldn’t believe how much space you can save with just a few shelves. This is because you are capitalizing on your vertical space so that you don’t have to sacrifice too much of your horizontal space – and when you do that, you will feel a huge difference.
Eleena Timmons