Going off to college is one of life’s most exciting experiences, especially when you get to experience the independence of living in the dorms for the first time. However, as the spring semester rolls around and you’ve been living on campus for around 6 months, you may begin to notice that a great deal of clutter has accumulated over time.
With the limited space available in dorm rooms, even the smallest amount of clutter can quickly make you feel claustrophobic. If you are looking for ways to clean up your dorm and take back control of your space, continue reading through our tips on how to best get organized and declutter.
Organize Your Space
Anyone who has ever lived in a dorm room can tell you that space comes at a premium. Whether you live with roommates or have a room to yourself, getting organized is the best way to declutter your dorm and maximize the space you have. There are many easy ways to organize your belongings, including:
Use Your Vertical Space
When your living quarters are a little tight, vertical spaces can be your greatest asset when it comes to storage. Install shelves, command hooks, or hanging over-the-door storage organizers to give your books, jackets, makeup, school and cleaning supplies, or other belongings a home off the floor. Vertical storage solutions are often inexpensive, easy to install, and don’t take up much space, giving you an easy way to create more space in your dorm room.
Multi-Use Furniture
You may not have a lot of room for furniture in your dorm room, which makes it critical to utilize the pieces you do have to the best of your ability. Multi-use furniture is an easy way to add storage space to your dorm. Consider swapping out additional chairs for storage ottomans and trunks or use a rectangular cube storage organizer to hold bins and act as an entertainment center for your television.
Above-and-Under-Bed Storage
Beds often take up a large amount of your dorm room, which makes the space directly above and underneath them great for adding storage. If you are able to loft your bed, the space below can free up floor space by holding dressers, cube storage units, mini refrigerators, and other large furniture or appliances. If raising your bed is not an option, there are many bins and other storage containers designed specifically for that tight space underneath your bed.
Adding shelving over your bed can also increase the amount of storage space available to you in your dorm. Free-standing raised shelving units can be assembled right around your bed in order to provide you with an additional spot to keep textbooks, electronics, and more.
Utilize Cubbies
There’s a reason why cubbies are so widely used in classrooms — they’re effective! A cube organizer is the perfect place to store baskets or bins of items, keeping them off the floor and neatly stacked out of the way. You can also use cube organizers as a table or entertainment center, placing your television and gaming systems on top and cutting down on the amount of other furniture you need in your room.
Creative Clothes Storage
It’s easy for clothes to begin piling up around your dorm room, especially when drawer and closet space is limited. In order to reduce the chance of these items becoming clutter, it’s important to properly utilize the clothing storage space you have.
Whether your dorm has a closet or a wardrobe cabinet, utilizing thin felt hangers over traditionally bulky wooden or plastic ones can help condense space. You can also purchase a hanging closet organizer to store your jeans, sweaters, shoes, and more more efficiently.
If you only have a couple of drawers available to store your clothes, rolling your garments into little cylinders is a good way to fit more into less space. Hat collections can also be stored on hanging rods in your closet or on the wall so they take up less space and do not get crushed or folded.
Keep Your Desk Organized
Your desk is one of the most important areas of your dorm room, and can be one of the easiest spaces to clutter up quickly with papers, supplies, or other items that don’t have a designated spot. Creating an organizational system for your desk is essential to keeping a clear work space.
Utilize plastic desk organizers and trays, as well as drawer dividers, to keep your pens, pencils, highlighters, papers, and other supplies neatly bundled together. You can also use binder clips to keep cables and cords organized. Simply hang the binder clip along the backside of the desk and wind the cables through the metal prongs — this prevents the cables from falling and breaking or getting lost or tangled when they aren’t in use.
Finally, investing in a desk hutch can provide you with more space to hold textbooks, supplies, and electronics in small boxes, magazine holders, or wicker baskets. Having a clean and organized workspace is vital to the success of students, which is why using even the simplest of organizational tools for your desk can make a big difference. Your desk should always be as clutter-free as possible.
Downsize Excess Items
Organizing your dorm room can be a great way to sort through your belongings and decide which items you need, and what is only causing clutter. From old papers or class notes that aren’t needed anymore, random giveaway items handed out by organizations around campus, or items you brought from home that you thought you would need in your dorm but have remained stashed in boxes, now is the perfect time to take inventory of your belongings. Decide what you need to keep and find places to properly store them, anything else can be thrown out, donated, or brought back home for the time being.
Get More Space for Your Dorm at Central Self Storage
If you have done everything you can to reduce the clutter in your dorm room and still find that you have more items than space to keep them, self storage can offer an affordable solution. Whether you need enough space to store seasonal clothes or a medium-sized unit perfect for excess furniture items, Central Self Storage can provide you with the room you need to declutter your dorm and get organized. Find one of our storage facilities near you and reserve your unit online today!
