To quote my youngest sister, "this room is so small an ant couldn't even live in here!" She's only seven, so her proportions might be a little bit off, but not by much! Each one of us, unless you're one of those lucky transfer students that didn't end up in a freshman dorm, has shared one of these 11x13 rooms and managed to live to tell the tale. Even though it might have gotten a little crowded at times, it was because we might have over-packed just a little bit.
Let's begin with the biggest part of the room, the bed.
This twin-XL is a little different than the bed of most dorms; we can't loft, stack, or arrange in any way we want. Do you want to know what we can do? We can roll them back and forth whenever we want (or don't want) to. This glorious place of relief for our over exhausted minds is a nice space saver, for when you want more floor space, you can push it under, but when you sit down, you have to disperse your weight accordingly between the bed and the back to avoid rolling around. You could end up with the luck of my roommate, where just about every time she sits on her bed, the mattress flips up and she ends up on the floor...
We also run the risk of falling into the NEVER ENDING BLACK HOLE ABYSS OF TERROR when we sleep if the bed moves around too much or if we accidentally pull it out a little too far before finally going to bed. If you're really lucky, you can use the abyss to your advantage, whether you're hiding a visitor after one am or your mom is coming and you need to make it look like you haven't been avoiding laundry for a month, you can just stuff them in the black hole until you get a chance to take care of the problem!
We do, however, get that pretty cool storage area with our beds, I personally don't use it much; I have too many pillows in the way. But for most, it's a wonderful storage area that is used for clothes, cleaning products, and whatever else you could possibly need.
Depending on what side of the room you’re on, you either have the sink or an empty space.
The empty space on one side can really be taken by whatever you want, for the first part of the year, I had a little shelving unit that is now sitting on my dresser. That space is now taken up by my fridge and the Keurig because our wonderful RA Matthew told us that if we keep our fridge above the vent, the heat will fry the circuits (THERE'S A TIP FOR YOU, IF YOUR FRIDGE IS THERE YOU SHOULD MOVE IT).
Having a sink in the room is probably the biggest blessing that comes in our dorms. Instead of waiting in line for one of the two sinks in the bathroom, we get to brush our teeth before ANY single bit of social interaction. GOODBYE MORNING BREATH!
Cons of this little area could be accidentally waking up your roommate while you're getting ready in the morning, or worse, your roommate could wake YOU up (selfish, I know, but every minute of sleep you can get is VERY important).
Along the wall, we have our dresser and our desks.
The dresser stretches the width of the windows and you and your roommate each get four and a half drawers. Like seriously, why nine drawers? There's obviously two people and now each pairing has to argue over who gets the extra drawer. My roommate and I made a community drawer full of CDs, movies, and snacks to avoid said argument. The top of the dresser is usually taken by a TV, speakers, gaming consoles, and other entertainment gadgets. I personally use it to reach the top of the shelf on top of the desk and I probably will fall off and break some kind of bone at some point because that's just how it works.
On to the desk: there's a little chair that probably doesn't match our roommate's that we spend a LOT of time in. This desk is with us through it all: late night cram sessions, facetime sessions with the fam, microwavable dinners, anything you can think of. We each have a board covered in memories from back home joined together with the new ones from finding your home here at VU.
The last part of this little area would be the shelf. This shelf is a wonderful part of the room and is great for storing books, binders, notebooks, and folders so they don't take up space on our desks. But the greatest part is that we CAN'T VERTICALLY STORE OUR BINDERS BECAUSE THE SHELF IS JUST TOO SHORT. AWESOME. This is a pretty good storage area for snacks and really anything else.
Lastly, we have the closet.
If you're anything like me, you have the perfect number of hangers strategically stuffed onto your single bar. You have clothes for any imaginable type of weather but it's completely justified because the weather around here changes more often than Kylie Jenner's hair. In our closets you will also find shoes, cleaning supplies, extra toiletries, laundry, and all of the messes we hid from our parents when they came to visit last weekend.
So whether you lived in Lank, Brandt, or Alumni, you know how it feels to roast your way through the beginning of the school year and hear the continuous sounds of people singing in the shower. These rooms might not be what we are used to, but they are definitely home.
