When my twin sister and I moved into our dorm room during our freshman year, we felt the need to immediately organize it. We wasted absolutely no time, and our room looked great by the time classes started, so we did not have to worry about that aspect of dorm life anymore.

Our dorm stayed pretty much the same way as we had set it up in our first few days living there — with minor alterations. Visitors pointed out how organized our room was when they visited us, and those compliments always came as a shock mostly because we did nothing special.

Because organizing our dorm took such little effort, we truly did not understand why our guests felt the need to comment in a surprised manner.

I cannot think of anything we did to keep our room looking neat that was out of the ordinary. Everything we did was so simple, but the results were effective.

I think our organization resulted from finding a specific purpose for each piece of furniture to prevent our dorm from looking cluttered.

The only issue we had was not thinking about where the Ethernet port was located in our room.

When we decided to connect our television so we could watch Netflix, we realized we had placed the television on the opposite wall from the Ethernet port. That resulted in a weird-looking fix because we had to place the long cable behind furniture and around walls.

Find a purpose for furniture

Because my twin sister was my roommate, I had a little more flexibility when it came to furniture arrangement. We decided to bunk our beds to maximize space and place our television, fridge, microwave and both dressers and bookshelves on the other side of the room.

Our dressers were located on each side of our fridge, and our microwave was on top of the fridge.

We stacked our bookshelves on top of my dresser and placed the television and radio on top of my sister’s dresser. Our desks were on opposite sides of the room. With the extra space in the middle of our dorm, we were able to create a living room look by placing two saucer chairs next to our bunk beds and facing the television.

Our arrangement allowed for easy access to all areas of our room, and we maintained a clean appearance by knowing where we wanted all our belongings to go and returning them to their storage areas every time.

Avoid a cluttered dorm look

My sister and I made our room look very organized by not filling it with too many decorations. We displayed only what was necessary and hid what looked untidy.

We put extra household items such as paper towels and canned food into boxes that went underneath our bunk beds. We placed smaller items such as extra floss and dryer sheets into plastic crates and stored them on the shelves in our closets.

We also found a way to fit shoe racks in our closets to keep our shoes organized and free up more space for clothes. In the end, our room looked neat, but we used nothing but simple tricks to make it that way.

Mariah is a junior in Media.
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