For a lot of students, going away to college is probably the first time that they will be living alone. Unfortunately for us, this adjustment probably entails having to live in a dreaded dorm room. You are most likely used to having a decent amount of space at home, as well as your own room — but college dorms are anything but homey. They have poor lighting, bland walls, and often make you feel like you are living in a shoe box. Don't let this scare you, though. There are plenty of easy and affordable ways to make your dorm room feel like home.

The summer before I began college was filled with me curating the perfect Pinterest boards filled with beautiful dorm room inspiration. I already had the majority of my dorm room planned out by the time I even committed to college. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have all the money in the world to spend on dorm decorations that would probably get thrown out after my Freshman year. Instead of spending all of the money that I got from graduation, I decided to save it and make DIY dorm room decorations instead. These are some of the decorations that I added to my freshman dorm room to make it feel a little more like home.

I got this idea from a post that I saw on Pinterest: a wall filled with records and vinyl covers. I’m a music fanatic, and I was obsessed with this. Unfortunately, I don’t have a record collection, and it would have been pretty expensive to purchase enough to cover my wall. I decided to print out album covers from the internet instead. I went through all of my favorite artists and picked out my favorite albums/album covers. I then just simply found an image of the album cover online and sent it to the store to be printed as a 5x5 image. I am so happy with the way that it turned out and I get compliments on this every time someone new walks in my room.

This was another idea that I got from Pinterest. Well, if I’m being entirely honest, pretty much all of these ideas came from Pinterest. I really wanted to create a naturey theme in my room, and I’m obsessed with flowers, so I thought this would be a perfect way to add my own personal touch to my dorm room. I haven’t seen anything else like this, and it gets me a ton of compliments.

To make this, you will need:

1. A bunch of fake flower bouquets (you can purchase these from a craft store). You will need about 30 total. You can buy these as individual flowers, but it is going to be cheaper to buy them in bulk in a bouquet. Get a variety of flowers in colors that fit well with your room theme.
2. A package of key rings
3. Twine (try to pick a thick and sturdy one)
4. A hot glue gun and hot glue gun glue sticks
5. Command Hooks

Once you have gathered all of your supplies, start separating the bouquets into individual flowers. Lay them out in the order that you want them. I did 5 rows with about 5 or 6 flowers in each row. I made sure that there weren’t two of the same type of flower next to each other, and tried to make the layout look random. Next, cut the twine so that it is long enough to fit all of the flowers in one of the rows with a little bit of space in between each. Each piece of my twine was about 6 feet long.

Take your hot glue and glue each flower onto the twine. Try to make sure that the entire flower length is glued to the twine so that it actually stays up when you hang it on your wall. Continue this until all of the flowers are glued onto the twine. The final step is to tie the key rings to the end of the twine. When you move into your dorm, attach your command hooks at the top of your wall and then hang the key rings on them. I taped the other end of the twine, as well as some of the flowers, to the wall so that they stay in place.

I have a pretty large sunglass collection, and I wanted a way to display them. I bought a chic gold picture grid from Target and hung it with two command hooks. I put my sunglasses all along the bottom and filled the rest of the grid with pretty greeting cards. I got all of mine for my birthday/graduation, but if you don’t have any that you want to display, I really like these greeting cards from Quotable.

I owe this one to a friend of mine. She made these for me a couple years ago, and I decided that they would fit perfectly in my room. She painted old bottles (can be any type of glass bottle) and I put some fake flowers in them. These make for a really beautiful and simple desk or window sill display.

You’ve probably seen string lights in every dorm room that you have ever been in/seen. There’s a reason for that. Dorm room lighting is really minimal and not the most relaxing. I don’t even really use my regular lights anymore. I just turn on my string lights for a more calming source of light. To make the lights fit in for with my floral/nature theme, I just added a garland above the string lights to create a cool effect. I purchased my string lights from Target, but you can pretty much find these anywhere. I purchased the garland from a seller on Etsy.

Mason jars are a great way to store anything from hair ties, plastic silverware, makeup brushes, pens, and pretty much anything else you need for storage. My room colors were grey, white, and gold, so I decided to make the mason jars fit in with my room by spray painting them gold. I added black chalk board stickers to each of my mason jars to label them.

I decided to print out a bunch of artsy photos that fit with my theme, as well as some quotes, from a free stock photo website. I just searched different things that I was passionate, and found images that fit both my color scheme, as well as the theme of my room. Once I got the images, I arranged them in the order that I wanted them in, and then glued them onto a white poster-board in the form of a collaged. I cut out the boundaries of the poster-board, and pinned it up to my bulletin board.

If you are living away from home for the first time, you probably want a way to display photos of your friends and family as well. For this, I edited 16 different photos in black and white, and then printed them out in 4x4 squares. This would also look really cool with Polaroid pictures. Next, I lined them up in rows of 4, and taped them to a clear string. I attached the clear string to a tree branch that I found outside, but you can also use a wooden dowel from a craft store. This is the example that I used as inspiration for mine.

Tapestries are something that would be pretty hard to DIY, but I have found some really cute and affordable ones from both Etsy and Society 6. I had the problem of not being allowed to have a tapestry larger than 3' by 3' in my dorm, and the majority of tapestries that I found were larger than 5'. Luckily, I found a ton of tapestries from W. Francis Design on Etsy — all of which were around $20. This is the one that I have displayed in my dorm:

If you are fortunate enough to be allowed to have a larger tapestry in your dorm room, Society 6 also has some really cool ones. These are some of my favorites: