It’s the last day of being on campus. You spent way too long packing up your college room and even longer saying goodbye to your friends, only to realize that some time later you have to deal with another type of room.
Your young childhood room is filled with old paraphernalia, bright colors, crinkled posters, random childhood toys, nostalgic pictures, burnt out lights, dead plants, piles of clothes you don’t know what to do with, and DUST.
Every college student despises cleaning their room for the summer.
Other than leaving behind the life you cultivated for the last nine months, the next worst thing to moving back home for the summer is your bedroom. Regardless of summer plans, family, or friends, your bedroom is the innocuous factor you internally dread.
Ask any college student moving back home for the summer. There is too much stuff and cleaning is seemingly too much effort for a couple of months, if that.
With summer activities, jobs, or internships, you doubt you will be spending much time in your room, yet the childish look subtly grates on you every night. And, the massive mess overly grates on you.
We are all inclined to just leave it as a small annoyance and deal with it for all summer, but don’t do it! My solution isn’t to just clean your room.
My solution is to find an aspect of your room to improve.
This has several benefits. However big or small, a noticeable change to your bedroom creates an illusion of novelty your room hasn't seen in a while. It keeps your focus on something productive but physical.
Redoing part of your room is a simultaneous form of unpacking, cleaning, and organizing to make room for your new things.
An improvement project keeps you busy and secluded enough so you can integrate back into your family dynamic slowly.
With the daunting task of fitting clothes from two suitcases in an already full closet, I put together a large box to donate or sell locally. I was still frustrated with my bedroom, and I realized the full closet wasn’t the factor that made me want to avoid it. It was the multicolor pink and blue walls I had chosen during middle school.
Repainting my walls was a great plan. It forced me to clean what I would have rather put off for later. Before I could repaint the walls, I had to push aside the clutter and as I did that, I organized it. I hate going through my “miscellaneous boxes,” but I was motivated so I could paint my room as soon as possible.
Within two days, I repainted the hot pink walls into a neutral gray which made a significant difference. I rearranged my desk and bookshelf to create a new atmosphere, and after taking down the large number of posters on my walls, I bought poster frames and updated the wall decor to fit my current artistic tastes. My middle school decorated room was replaced with something better.
With the addition of a new poster and a salt rock lamp, the stuffy look and feeling of my old room transformed into something new and bright.
Moving back home for the summer is so much effort, not to mention the daunting task of unpacking. Fight that dull, nagging feeling that you get from your bedroom when you are home for the first few weeks.
Paint your walls, create a DIY project, rearrange your furniture, or update the wall decor. It’s a natural process of unpacking, cleaning, organizing, and redoing. When you improve an aspect of your room, you make the familiar into something fresh.
