How to Cheaply Decorate a Girl's Dorm Room

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today I'm going to talk about how to cheaply decorate a girls dorm room. While I was living in college I had to live in the dorms for my entire four years. So I've had lots of rooms to decorate and lots of ideas for you. First of all big mistakes people make is they do not look at the rooms before they go and start to buy things for it. So first of all go in to the room when it's empty. Look around and see what you can do with the room. Next, make sure that you keep it, if you want to keep this cheap, keep it to the essentials. Don't splurge on drapery for a dorm room, if you want to say have a small refrigerator that you can use. So keep it to things that are going to be more useful. And if you do want some sort of drapery, I actually have some pictures here of one of my old dorm rooms. And the drapery that I used were actually beads that I hung from the windows to give it that sort of feel that there was something there without actually having to splurge on a hundred dollars worth of drapery. Next, choose your theme by color and think about how that color is going to affect the mood of the room. Blue is a very softening color, a very calming color. Red is a little more intense but also warm and cozy feeling. The, as we see in pictures here of my old dorm room, we sort of had lots of different colors but the main, the main portion of the room, especially in this room, since it's a very small room, containing basically a desk and my bed, the bed was the absolute focal point of the room. So the bedspread sort of dictated what everything else was going to look like in the room. So think about your bedspread . Next, take what you can take from home whenever you move yourself or if you're a parent, if you move your daughter to college. Think of what you can take from your house and give to her, that you can use so you can sort of save money on having to buy extra stuff for her. Next, in order to make this cheap for yourself, make yourself a list and stick to it. Make sure that you don't veer off too far from where you're trying to stay in your budget. And last buy not least, get creative with the room. If you look here at my dorm room one last time, I actually made two posters in this picture out of card stock and printed it out on my ink jet printer. So you can actually make your own posters if you have to. And I did that for several rooms. I remember making these sort of mall art myself. And also using things like these lanterns that go across the top of the room here, are pretty cheap as well as the rope light that hangs in this picture. O.k., so have fun with it, remember my tips and good luck."