Small College Rooms, Conquered!
From Planning a Layout to Keeping Clean, Living Small Can be Done
Jun 27, 2008
Problem: a Tiny Place to Call Home
With as many as five pieces of furniture in the tiniest room you’ve ever seen (are you sure this isn’t the closet?), what is the best way to arrange your college dorm furniture for maximum space?
Melissa Brethauer is a University of Central Florida sophomore living in the smallest-sized bedroom in the Jefferson Lofts apartments near campus. Her biggest challenge was fitting everything into the tiny space. After moving her bed, desk and side table numerous times, she ended up exactly where she started: with no room to walk through, much less live in, her college space.
Some Help, Please?
If Melissa had known about www.floorplanner.com, she would’ve saved a lot of time and annoyance.
This free Web site allows you to input the dimensions of your dorm/apartment room and arrange everything from your furniture to where you’ll keep your piles of dirty clothes.
With the dimensions of a room, anyone can virtually arrange furniture, lamps, rugs, laptops, etc. This way, you can have your room layout perfectly completed before you even arrive at school! This would be much easier than dragging the heavy dorm furniture, a college room staple, into every position imaginable.
Simply visit your future school's Web site and click on the residence hall information to get room dimensions.
Moving Day: Plan in Hand
After you've come up with your plan, it's time to move in. Before you unpack any of your stuff, go into the room empty-handed (except for your plan) and arrange the furniture.
After that is done, it'll be easier to unpack everything else without having to move the furniture around it.
Melissa's Tips for After You've Configured That Room of Yours:
- Bed risers= life-savers. You would be surprised how much fits underneath a bed.
- The barer your walls, the bigger your room will feel. There's no need to cover every surface with posters!
- Only keep as much stuff as you can fit under the bed. There's usually nowhere else to put anything.
- Get a rug – it looks good and you don't have to vacuum. As much.
- If all else fails, live somewhere else next semester!
How to contain the loose ends
Online suppliers offer many organizers to make good use of every square inch, especially the odd-shaped space at the top of the closet and the prized square footage under the bed. The trick is not to not have clutter – it's to keep it hidden so that your living space seems larger than it is!
A small space just takes planning and patience
Living small makes prior planning and continued cleaning necessary. But it can be done. Melissa even decided to stay in her tiny bedroom for one more year, having made peace with her space.
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