Saving space if you have only one room for all your stuff

College students - whether they live at home with their parents or on their own on campus or elsewhere in town - in general do not have very much room for keeping their stuff. Now, later in life your space is likely to be limited too - unless you marry a billionaire - but for college students, space is more limited because they usually have only one room for keeping all their stuff. Again, unless your parents are billionaires, which is unlikely for 99% of us. Do not worry, I am to the rescue. Since I hate throwing away stuff that could be useful in the future or just because I like to keep some for the sake of nostalgia, you would say my room is a mess of things piled up all over the place. Well ... not exactly. If you use the space you have wisely, there are enough square meters left for a desk, a bed and a closet. 

It is not the monster under your bed ... Indeed, with some boxes and wooden chests under your bed, there is no room for monsters and you can save a lot of room. Reckon with the height of your bed though, before buying boxes and chests. 

Boxes on top of your closet and bookcases are a great idea if your closet does not reach the ceiling. The taller you are, the more boxes you can pile on top of your closets and cases! I must confess that it looks somewhat messy with all the different colours, but if you keep the rest of your room in simple, basic colours (I personally like white and blue), this is rather a means of adding some colour than an annoying disturbance. However, if you like to go all the way with colours, feel free to do so! 

As you can see, I do not have four straight-up walls in my room, which forces me to be creative sometimes. The little bookcase next to the big one was ideal for the angle of the wall, yet it still keeps much of what I wanted to be stored. If I wished, I could put a little box on top, but since I don't, I leave this for some accessories. 

I have always been fond of these magazine boxes. They may take up a lot of your precious space if not used, but if they are, - just look at the next photo -

you can cram in so much paperwork! Notebooks, readers, prints of the powerpoint presentations shown during lectures, and even smaller binders! The binder in this picture is more of a 'show-album' sized binder, though. 

Then ... if you have many CDs/DVDs/smaller books, there is a solution for that, too. No need to spend many bucks on bookcases, if you arrange the shelves with these CDs/DVDs/smaller books like this: 

It comes down to two rows of CDs on a shelf. This requires the shelves to be at least 35 cm/13.8 inches deep, though, but since college textbooks are big as well, you need deeper shelves anyway. 

These. So much of these. I think they are available in many sizes, so you can adjust them to wherever you want to put them, and they are so practical. I use the drawers for magazines, beauty stuff and cables and manuals for my modern technologies, but you could basically story anything in it. 

It is obvious I have too much room after all having applied all of the above advices to my own room, but if you have not, you could try to find a box that fits under the drawers of your desk. It also looks more tidy to put the waste bin under your desk and it saves another little corner in your room. 

So, this was the blog about saving space in your room. Comments or questions are welcome, as always. 

Introduction

So, the holidays are almost over. Monday, September 5th, I'll have my first lecture at 9.00 AM. So goodbye days off and holidays and hello textbooks and lectures! Being a Dutch student, I have to do a minor in the first semester of the third year of my Bachelor. It might seem easy to choose one, but it isn't. Sure, some courses require their students to do the in-depth minor of the course and then there's not much to choose, but most courses (at least, at the University of Groningen) allow you to broaden your horizon by offering you the possibility to take classes in another course or even another faculty. 

Now, as with studies, there are many minors to choose from and each one seems more interesting than the one before, or so I felt when I had to choose. I had already taken the easy way by having chosen the in-depth minor of Educational Sciences, but then there was an announcement on the website of our faculty about a minor in Sociological Research. I skimmed the text quickly and saw that all students with a propaedeutic certificate from our faculty were eligible. Since I wish to apply for the Research Master of our faculty after having obtained my Bachelor's degree, I thought that a few extra Statistics-related lessons could be handy.

This minor also allows me to consider whether or not I really want to take so many Statistics and Methodology subjects during my Master and whether or not I can do it. Ambition is one thing, ability is another and in certain balances they can bring wonderful results. Either way, I'll have to take my Statistics book from the shelves and review it when I have time left to be prepared for subjects like Advanced Statistics and Model Building. Other subjects I'll have are Research Practical, Text Analysis for Social Sciences, Behavioural Theories of Sociology and EU Decision Making. All in all, it's not just about numbers and funny calculating signs, but also some actual Sociology-related subjects, which sound really interesting to my knowledge-thirsty brain :) 

I've already seen my timetable, which looks manageable. I've already put it in my diary and next week it's time for me to get some sort of notebook, the textbooks and syllabi and maybe some other useful things. I like to be prepared for the new year in college and I'm looking forward. If fate doesn't mess with me too badly, I'll actually have a title by the end of this year and the subjects I'm going to have make my heart beat just a tad faster, which I think is a good sign. I'll soon put up some more general and universal posts =)