How to Decorate Your Room (for Free!)

By Fiona Ewing | 9/28/16 10:41am

Miss out on the poster sale in FoCo last week? Were you at the career fair instead? Well besides needing to get your priorities straight, you’ve got a bigger issue. You are just starting to notice how bare the walls of your room are as you look up from your computer at 8:50pm Sunday night and wonder why the recruiting deadline couldn’t be midnight instead of nine. But that’s beside the point.

What matters now is how you’re going to decorate. And because you’re still looking for a job, you have to decorate on a budget. Ideally for free. Well, here’s the list that will help you do just that.

  1. Go to BarHop for some adult coloring! Then hang up your masterpiece to remind yourself every day that yes, you are an adult.
  2. Steal a composite. Whether it’s from your house or not is up to you. You could casually stroll around trying to find the one with the best-looking people, or just go straight for the greatest number of puppies.
  3. Take a ton of plastic cups home with you the next time you playing pong. Proceed to mount alternating trees and shrubs up and down your walls.
  4. Steal the door decs off the doors of everyone else on your floor. Rip off everyone’s names and display them on your own wall.
  5. Go to the HOOD Downtown Exhibition Space. Ask where they put what they uncluttered during the renovation.
  6. Family photos. You do remember you have a family outside of Dartmouth, right?
  7. Find out who does the fancy lettering and drawings on the signs outside KAF and strike a deal. Commission a chalk portrait of you in exchange for the promise to spend all your end of term extra DBA at KAF.
  8. Get a smaller room. It will feel less sparse and undecorated. Of course, only do this if art means more to you than space for your various boots and boat shoes because otherwise you won’t be prepared for the five temperature phases Hanover experiences in a single day.
  9. But if you need the space and your room is already enough of a cluttered mess, take up origami as a hobby and decorate the remaining visible surface with small paper miniatures.
  10. Take Drawing 1 or any other art class and decorate with your own works of art. Hopefully your room gets better decorated throughout the term as your skills improve.
  11. Have your more artistically talented friend make you something in their art class.
  12. Nonchalantly tell your roommate that they should decorate.
  13. If you have a bunch of Kleenex boxes with cool graphics on them, cut them into squares, alternate them like tiles at the base of your wall, and hope it actually looks good.
  14. In a few weeks, you can cut up the pants that you don’t fit into anymore because of all that EBAsDominos. Then try to make some sort of patchwork quilt, or just haphazardly tack them onto the wall as a constant reminder that you’ve let yourself go.
  15. Just as unhealthily, display your failing grades.
  16. If you don’t want to take my advice, watch a DIY video. Apparently you can make a jewelry holder out of branches.

Fiona Ewing