People often think of a dorm room as a provisional space, a disposable and transitory closet that also has windows and a bed. This most iconic site of the college experience deserves more attention than a few posters and some Tupperware boxes under the bed. Most people occupy their room for a full nine months, give or take some vacations. A little foresight can go a long way toward making even the meager space allotted in a USM dormitory more useful.
You can tell when a room’s inhabitants don’t care about decorating and haven’t paid it the first thought. Most male-occupied rooms are pretty much interchangeable: The furniture remains wherever the summer cleaning crews left them, the beds jutting from the walls at jaunty angles. Refrigerators and microwaves are stacked in one corner, dirty clothes in another.
Wrinkled and torn Christina Aguliera posters are nailed or taped without frames, overwhelmed by vast expanses of scuffed whitewash. Amid the squalor, expensive consumer electronics are oases of tidiness-say, a giant television connected to an Xbox with neat stacks of games and DVDs. The best furniture is arrayed around the TV and the best furniture is the ubiquitous folding canvas camping chair. Rooms like this are more like staging areas for Animal House adventures than a place to live and to work-you can study in the damned library!
The prototypical dorm room can be refined, to a point: by washing your sheets, framing your classic movie posters and throwing down some carpet, you can make your room charming, even cozy-but that’s just a progression in the same vein. You won’t escape the impression of a place where a couple of some beds and personal effects have been deposited so you can run off to chase down an adventure. A room like that is unremarkable, but worse, its uses are limited. You can only cram so much stuff into a closet and under your bed. You can only seat a certain number of people on your bed before they start to feel silly, sitting there on your bed with their beer tucked between their knees.
If you want to have a place with some class, a place where beautiful people will want to visit and lounge around, you’ll have to dig up some space for some cool furniture for them to lounge on. And you’ll want to impress them with your exhaustive record collection and your bitchin’ snowboard too, so you’ll have to find a place to put those.
You don’t get much to work with: most rooms are little more than sparsely furnished square cells; privacy is difficult to come by; and many rooms come with little or no built-in lighting. If you’ve decided to kick your room’s layout to the next level, it’s clear that some planning is in order.
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