Summer is over, and a new crop of students will be moving to the Hill. But dorm rooms are small spaces, and UCLA will be your home for an entire school year, so how will you make your dorm room space your own?
Drab dorm rooms can be spiced up with a few simple and easy tips that will give your new home some personality and make living away from home a little more comfortable.
First, choose a color scheme.
“Decorating your dorm room is so “˜whatever you like,'” said Lori Dennis, an interior designer and owner of Dennis Design Group.
Dennis, who attended the L.A. chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers at UCLA Extension, said green and blues will help students sleep, while reds and yellows can help them stay awake.
Adding colored paper or fabric to the walls of your room is a good way to add some color, she said.
Posters, frames, French memo boards, magnets, dry erase boards and pictures of you and your friends can also add a touch of personality to an otherwise drab dorm room, according to RentalDecorating.com, an interior design Web site.
Briana Vincent, a third-year art history student who is interested in interior design, said she prefers soothing posters to liven up her dorm.
“We liked posters that are kind of relaxing, because dorms are such claustrophobic environments,” she said. “Posters of beaches and palm trees.”
Adding mirrors to the walls of your dorms can also make your small space appear larger, she added.
Next, focus on your bed.
“One idea is to raise the set up on a platform or lift your bed to have more room,” Dennis said. “You could add a sofa or lounge chair and have more of a private lounge.”
Or, if your bed is closer to the floor, invest in some throw pillows, which can add a bit of pizzazz and allow your bed to double as a sofa when friends come over, according to the rental decorating site.
Dennis said another problem all college students encounter is getting sleep during busy, irregular schedules.
“One of the things that I say people would want is blackout drapes,” Dennis said. “They’d allow you to sleep any time, because of a kooky schedule.”
But when you are awake, lighting is vital for studying. Invest in stand-up lamps, or even hanging lamps can add an edgy vibe to your room, she said.
Vincent said light can also add to the mood of a room.
“We put up little lights, because we wanted ambience,” Vincent said. “We had the white twinkle lights around the edges of our room and in the window. Then we put purple lights in the foyer/entrance of the room so that it would be a different color and that would be our night light since it was darker.”
Storage space is another critical component to a comfortable dorm, especially since space is so tight, she said.
Plastic crates in your closet, under your bed or next to your desk are cheap and come in a variety of colors. They can help avoid clutter in small spaces.
Closet organizers and cheap plastic hooks are another handy way of creating a place for your towel, bathrobe or even book bag.
But the Office of Residential Life does impose a few regulations for what dorm-dwellers can and cannot do to their rooms.
“Generally, they shouldn’t be altering the physical structure, like painting or changing the carpeting,” said Valery Holtom, the ORL judicial affairs coordinator. “And if they want to loft their beds or bunk the beds, they shouldn’t be doing that on their own.”
Students are encouraged to have a small refrigerator or microwave in their rooms to increase comfort, Holtom said.
But separate refrigerators are not allowed. Only MicroFridges are OK, and they can be rented from the ORL.
Tape and nails shouldn’t be used on the walls, she said, though students are encouraged to use poster putties.
When it comes down to it, students have a lot of leeway in how they decorate their dorms, and they should get creative, Dennis said.
Some of the most comfortable rooms are achieved by coordinating with roommates, Vincent said.
“But don’t be too pushy,” she added.
And if you really need some ideas, you can always look to magazines.
“I think that it’s just such a personal choice, but there are a lot of really fun options to make it somewhere you want to be,” Dennis said.