College Dorms are filling up with students. I read today the Obama’s helped Malia move into her Harvard dorm.
I helped my daughter last week. She’s a sophomore this year. Still plans to stay in the dorm. She may switch to an apartment next year.
Did you have a kid going to college this Fall?
Many students decorate. Maybe tape up a poster and setup a stereo. Some, design & decorate.
This family went all out. Using elevated beds is smart. It adds so much more useable space in that small dorm room. It came out nice. I’d prefer a bit more color, but it’s not my room.
Please post other similar stories. It’s always interesting to see what students can do to make their dorm feel less institutional.
Pffft - as soon as I can save up for the rest of the paneling and drop ceiling tiles I’m gonna have the most cool room there is (I even know where the bumper pool table will go).
Nothing will ever be cooler than my freshman dorm room. The building was built in about 1900 and I had a working wood-burning fireplace. Our RAs bought a cord of wood and for some insane reason they let us have fires whenever we wanted. In retrospect, not the brightest idea, but at the time it was awesome for cold New England nights (and I only forgot to open the damper and nearly suffocated after going to sleep with a fire burning once).
This. The beds in the article each have four legs, taking up precious floor space. The best loft design is a single structure that puts two legs against each against the left and right walls of the room, with cross beams that span the room; the beds are then hung from the cross beams and legs, leaving the floor as unobstructed as possible.
Yeah, aside from the wallpaper and faux-marble contact paper on the desks, it looked like a pretty typical “done up” dorm room to me. I guess the bed lofts were nicer than the ones made from 2x4s I usually saw in college.
I knew a couple guys who pretty much made a second floor to their room with their mattresses up there but I think they ultimately had to take it down since the limited access up and down (one trapdoor style hole with a ladder) was a fire escape risk.
No pics, but a friend of mine who was a physics major had his bed on a pulley system so it could be raised up during the day to open up space in his dorm room. Also in that dorm there were two rooms immediately adjacent to the main lounge, and thus had 20 foot ceilings. One year two guys in one of those rooms built an elaborate loft that incorporated a spiral staircase. You could stand both above and below the loft.
$2,400 for custom decor? I wish. That’s a year’s tuition!
At my dorm, students were forbidden to make ANY alterations to the room. We weren’t even allowed to use tape to put up posters. No tape, no pushpins, nothing. Painting and installing wallpaper? That would be a huge fine plus eviction.
Our doom rooms looked like drab solitary confinement cells. Hated every minute of living there and got the hell off campus after my first year (Freshmen were required to live in the dorms during their first year).
We couldn’t make permanent alterations including holes in the walls. But you could use tape or sticky-tack for posters. Some people used pins anyway and just filled the holes with toothpaste or similar to hide the damage after the fact. Carpets and rugs were common, of course. Some people did lofts or bunk beds. Taking the bolster cushion off next to your bed gave you a couple extra inches of bed space (and an open shelf) at the cost of no “couch” function.
I see the room in the article mainly as Drunky Smurf describes: Nothing really innovative to dorm rooms, just higher priced stuff.
Just sent my eldest girl off to college last week. It’s an extension campus, so there are no traditional dorms, but there are student-only apartments nearby. She has a tiny 1-bedroom, furnished, and it’s fairly nice. The price isn’t, however. Almost $10,000 for the school year and that doesn’t include a meal plan (there aren’t any). Next year she wants to move to one that’s a little farther down the road but half the price and nicer.
When I was in college thirty years ago, the rule was that there had to be enough space between the bed and the ceiling that a firefighter in full gear (with the tanks mounted on the back) could get above you in the event you were unconscious and needed rescuing. I can’t remember how many feet this translated to, but that was the big reason your bed couldn’t be too close to the ceiling.
Also, most lofts were made from scratch, although this was an engineering school, so the ability to build a workable loft represented sort of a qualifying test. (I assume today you can buy ready-made lofts from IKEA or similar such places.)
ISTR 30 inches, although they told us it was because there had been cases of people who had their beds closer to the ceiling and sat bolt upright when their alarm went off, incurring significant head injuries.
My room number freshman year was 314 and my roommate and I wanted to modify the painted room number to read 3.14159. (As I said, this was a nerd school.) But the housing office denied the request.
