Speaker 1: What's up you guys? It's your girl Dyea. So today I am back with a very special video. This video is going to be targeted at incoming freshmen or I guess you could say anyone that is looking to spice up their dorm a little bit. So I'm going to be talking about some cute ways, y'all cute, cute ways you can spice up your dorm while actually optimizing storage at the same time. So a lot of people will say, oh, I have to have all these storage bins and I need to store all this stuff in my dorm, but by having to store all this stuff in my dorm, it can't look cute. But I am coming to let you guys know that it is possible to optimize storage in your room while still keeping your room looking cute. So this is also a collab with my girl Lala Alexis. I will have her video and her channel linked in the description box. So please go check out her channel, watch her video, subscribe. Y'all, she has some amazing content and her videos are so funny. So please go check it out. So she's going to be talking about some necessities that freshmen or anyone in general needs for their dorm room, basically like a what to pack. So I'm doing the ones where you like optimize storage and make it cute so you can bring everything that she's telling you to bring in her video. So I will, like I said earlier, I will have all that information linked in the description box below. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and stop rambling. We're going to get on with the video. Don't forget to click that good old like and subscribe button and we're going to get this rolling. So before we go ahead and jump into the video, I'm going to just insert this quick clip of how my dorm looked my freshman year at Claflin University. I stayed in Kleist Hall and I actually had the smaller side of the room. So all of the tips I'm telling you guys in this video, this is not stuff that I found on YouTube. These are all just hacks that I learned throughout the year. Okay, so now that y'all see what I was working with for my freshman year, I'm just going to go ahead and get onto the tips and hacks that I figured out throughout my freshman year. So tip number one is to have a theme. Y'all, if you want your room to look cohesive and just really pretty, you need to have a theme. So choose about three colors. My three colors were white, pink, and gold with a splash of gray. But my main colors were white, pink, and gold. So pick a theme and make sure when you're buying the stuff for your dorm, have it within that theme. It'll make stuff look so much better. You'll have a theme throughout your room. If you're talking to your roommate, contact your roommate and see if y'all went to coordinate at all so it's not just like you have like blue, yellow, orange on one side and like purple, pink, and gray on the other side. Just if y'all can't coordinate, try to coordinate. My roommate and I did and it worked out so well. We actually even got each other like matching blankets and matching pillows and stuff like that because, you know, we're just trying to be cute with it. But yeah, so just have a theme. It'll make everything look so much better. Tip number two, have a place for everything. You guys, storage bins are going to be your best friend. Later on in the video, I'll tell you guys how you can conceal the storage bins in your room so they're not just sitting out and so you don't just see everything. But before you go in, just make sure you have a place for everything. So when you're going and getting your dorm stuff and shopping at Target, Walmart, wherever you go, just make sure you're looking for enough storage bins because your room only comes with your dresser, the wardrobe, and like your desk. The rest of that is up to you guys. So if you're bringing a lot of stuff, make sure you have storage for a lot of stuff. Tip number three, velvet hangers. You guys, I made the mistake of trying to bring like, I didn't bring my whole closet. I still brought seasonally, but I still brought way more clothes than I needed to, but it was okay because I had velvet hangers. So if you guys don't know what velvet hangers are, I'll insert a picture right here of what they look like. They're these super tiny, thin hangers, but they're velvet so they really hold your clothes in place so you don't have your clothes falling out of your wardrobe and stuff. So velvet hangers are perfect because I was able to have like twice as many clothes in my closet than my friends that they had the regular plastic white hangers because the velvet hangers allows you to like squish this much clothes into this amount of clothes because they're so compact. So get velvet hangers, it'll make your life a whole lot easier, especially when you have a really tiny closet because my top closet was kind of tiny. I'm not gonna lie. The next one is get bed risers. You guys, my bed risers, my bed was super high. Y'all could see from the video, my bed was super high and it was because I had my bed on the second to highest setting like when you can loft your bed like in the bed. I don't know if that makes sense, but I also had like the tallest bed risers from Walmart. So I kind of had to like jump in my bed or you can get a little step stool or whatever. Because I used bed risers, I was able to put my fridge under my bed and I have a super tall fridge. It's a mini fridge. It's a fridge and freezer. I was able to put my fridge under my bed. I had my shoe storage. I had an organizer bin. I had my food. I think I said food already. I had a whole bunch of stuff under my bed. I had clothes hanging up under my bed. I could fit so much stuff under my bed because it was so high. If I didn't raise my bed, I would have had nowhere to put my fridge because with my side of the room, it was really tiny that I had no other area other than I had my desk, my bed, my dresser and my wardrobe and that took up all the space and I had a pretty big fridge. So I had to find some type of way to, you know, put my fridge on my side and make it fit because I had to work with what I had. So get bed risers. It makes your life a whole lot easier. And also I just feel like it makes the room look cuter because your bed is like lofted really high and it's just like this statement thing when you walk in the room. So personally, I wanted my bed as high as possible. So I made my bed as high as possible. The next thing is to get a comforter and mattress pad. So throughout the year, I realized that my bed felt bigger than it was because I had this really thick mattress pad and I got a king size comforter and folded it in half. So being that like the mattress pad kind of laid over the size of the mattress a little bit, it made my bed feel bigger and I also had a whole bunch of pillows. So if you want your bed to feel bigger than it is, get a really thick mattress pad, get a really thick comforter and get like 50 million pillows. I didn't sleep with the 50 million pillows, I like threw them on the floor, but it just gives this illusion that you're in a bigger bed and also your comforter makes a huge difference and your pillows make a huge difference because when you walked into my room, my bed was the first thing you saw. So being that I had like a coordinating comforter with the bed skirt and the cute pillows, it just is like a statement. It took up most of the room. So it was just like, oh, that's cute without me having to do a whole bunch of other decorations. So the key is to get a really thick mattress pad and a really nice comforter. And like I said with my comforter, instead of getting a twin XL, because the twin XL is like they're really small and all they can do is just drape over the end of your bed and kind of just look like this really long thing. I decided to get a king comforter and I folded the comforter in half. So it made my comforter look thicker than it was and I'll reinsert a picture right here so you guys can see. But yeah, it just made my bed look a whole lot better. So the key is to get a queen or a king size comforter, king preferably, and then fold the king comforter in half and like laid on your bed and then it'll be like, it'll just be the size of your mattress. You don't have to worry about a long piece drooping over and all that stuff. So the next hack is going to be if you have a lot of shoes. I brought a whole bunch of my shoes my freshman year. I will never do that again. A whole bunch of them just sat in a bucket under my bed. But if you're somebody like me and you have a lot of shoes and you kind of just don't know what shoes you want to wear with what outfit and you're going to end up bringing a good bit of shoes, then I would really recommend this hack. So basically all you have to do is just buy a cube organizer. I will insert a picture right here and I'll also link it in the description box. But if you get a cube organizer off of like Amazon or whatever the website I got mine off of, I will put it in the description box. It was around 50 bucks for 16 cubes and what you can do is under your bed, if you raise your bed up, you can set up the cube organizer thing under your bed against the wall. And so it's more length than width, so it won't take up a lot of space. And so you can fit multiple shoes in each cube. Like I'm looking at mine in my closet right now and I can fit at least three pairs of shoes in each cube. So that is a perfect way to optimize storage to keep your cubes, keep your shoes organized because in my freshman dorm, I did not have any shoe storage. So that is an awesome way to store your shoes while at the same time not having them laying all over the place and getting messed up because you have no place to put them. My next hack would be basically a DIY hack for the dormify, so y'all know the bed skirts they have on dormify for the SwenXO beds. So I did not want to pay at least $80 for this bed skirt that is all, it's all is this fabric. So initially my mom was going to like sew some regular sheets together, but we ran out of time when I was moving in and that never happened. So what we ended up doing, we just took some basically just regular, I think we did four sets of twin sheets and all I did was just tucked it into, I know some people have like wood beds so it's different, you can velcro it, you can do something, but all we did was just tuck a bunch of the sheets up together and tuck them into the springs of my bed. So when y'all are looking at this picture and you're seeing like this really long bed skirt thing, you guys, all it is is sheets. People ask me all the time, oh my gosh, your bed skirt is so cute y'all, it's fabric. That's all it is. Dormify is sewing some fabric together and charging y'all a hundred something dollars for this bed skirt that you can make with linen sheets in your closet. That's all it is. So that is a perfect way, I was able to conceal all this stuff under my bed, I had my laundry, I had food, and like this storage thing, I had a storage basket with all of my like tank tops and undergarments, I had a bucket of shoes, I had my refrigerator, all that stuff was under my bed and it could look a mess at times, but no one would ever know because no one went under my bed except for me. So just use some sheets, tuck that bad boy in, linen drape a little bit, and there you go. I just gave y'all a hack for a DIY bed skirt. Okay so for my next hack is on how to, I guess you can say spice up your refrigerator. So I knew that I wanted pink all over my room, pink is my favorite color, this is that other. So I said okay, how can I make this ugly black refrigerator match the theme of my room? So my mom came up with a brilliant idea to spray paint my refrigerator while saving money at the same time. So instead of it going and buying this $200 refrigerator straight out of Walmart, off of online, whatever, and pay $200 for it, we decided to go on the Facebook marketplace and find a used refrigerator that works, and I got my refrigerator, I saved $150 because I got my refrigerator for $50 and who doesn't want to save $150 because that is more money that I had in my pocket going back to school that I could spend. So we went on the Facebook marketplace, found a Black and Decker mini fridge and freezer for $50, went to Lowe's, Home Depot, whatever, got some pink spray paint, and spray painted my refrigerator. Y'all this was the best decision ever because when I was moving in people were like oh my gosh she has a pink fridge, she has a pink fridge, that's so cute. It fit in my room perfectly because it wasn't like I had this ugly black refrigerator sitting in the middle of my room, it actually looked like an accessory. So if you guys want to spice up your fridge a little bit, get some spray paint and spray paint that bad boy. It's not going to hurt it, mine had like a little dent in the side, the outside had some scratches up because I got it used, but I knew it was going to be painted so there was no point in buying a fridge for $200 that's going to operate the same way the $50 one does. I'm just not going to see the outside and see the scratches, so it worked. So I spray painted that bad boy and it literally was the cutest thing ever and it fit in my room so well. So the next hack I used across my room was painting command strips and literally painting anything in my room that did not match my theme. So I don't know if I have the clip still, if I do have it I'll insert it over here, but we were literally, the day I moved into Claflin, we were in the Walmart parking lot and my mom was spray painting the command strips we bought gold in the middle of the parking lot. But it was so cute because depending on the size of the command strips and how much stuff you're hanging, the command strips can stand out and I did not just want some white command strips or black command strips sitting on my wall so we decided to paint them. Same thing for like, I had some accessories that did not match my theme, it was like silver and it needed to be gold, all we did was spray paint them. So do not be afraid to spray paint or to paint things or to alter them so that they match your theme because it's the little things in the end that makes a difference. So I bought like this white and silver lamp from, it was like this white lamp with the silver like handle from Target and we were like, that doesn't really match the theme, all we did was spray painted it. So little stuff like that goes a long way. Also to hang up jewelry inside of my closet, we painted the little command strips gold and we hung the command strips inside my wardrobe and I could use that to hang all my jewelry in. So if you need a place to hang your jewelry, just get some command strips and put it inside of your closet and then you can hang all of your jewelry on your closet door and then once you close your closet door, your jewelry isn't out anymore. Because I'm the type of person, I don't like a whole bunch of miscellaneous stuff sitting all over the place. Everything has to have a place and when everything has a place, your life is a whole lot easier. Okay so last but not least, a brilliant way to optimize storage in your room while also keeping it cute would be to get a rolling cart. So I got this rolling cart from, I'll insert a picture of it, I think I got it from Marshalls? I want to say I got it from Marshalls, but it's like this three tier rolling cart. On the top I was able to keep my shower caddy, I'm looking at it right now, I was able to keep my shower caddy that had my soap, toothbrush, face wash, bath towels, all that stuff inside of the shower caddy. I had that sitting on the top. On the middle row I had my hair products, my perfumes, all of that stuff, like shampoo, conditioner, my gel, my hair oils and all that stuff and on the bottom rack I was able to keep my flat iron, blow dryers, anything that had any type of cord. So by getting that organizer rack, it was able to slide in this little crack next to my desk and in between my bed. So by having this crack I was able to eliminate having a whole bucket for this or having to hang my shower caddy somewhere else but then put my flat irons tucked away in another area. It just made it where if I knew I needed anything that pertained to hair, beauty, all that stuff, I was able to just put it on that crack, slide it into this little corner and I could just go to it whenever I needed something and it made it so convenient. The next organization cart I had, it was this three tier rack from, I want to say it was from Marshalls as well. It was around $70 but it was the best $70 ever because I was able to keep these little bins in them. So I'm going to just use this as an example. It's kind of a mess because I've tucked stuff in it since being home. So this rack had three holes and each of the holes I was able to keep a mini storage bin like this. And this like sat, I'll insert a picture again so you guys can see and I'll circle it. It sat right next to my bed so it was kind of like my mini nightstand for my dorm. This was really cool because no one's room I ever went in, they had anything like this. They kind of had like the little side pouches that hang on the side of your bed that you can kind of slide your phone in but I was able to have a mini lightstand, not lightstand, a mini nightstand. So it was really skinny, it fit perfectly in that little hole and I was able to fit so much miscellaneous stuff in it that was at my convenience anytime I wanted. So basically I had three little baskets like this. So when I was in my dorm, the top basket I had had snacks in it. So if it was 3 o'clock in the morning and I needed a granola bar or I wanted a bag of chips or I was just taking a nap in my bed, watching some Netflix and didn't feel like getting out of my bed to go grab a snack, I had the top one like this was just full of snacks. So I would just keep my snacks in there and whenever it would run low, I would just refill it. The middle bin was this bin. So this had a whole bunch of miscellaneous stuff, okay my AirPods case is in here, but I had like my heating pad, my air freshener, my glasses case, I had medicine like Tums, some vitamins like sunscreen, anything you could think of, like anything. I had like bug spray, I have some dust in here, I have not gone in here really since being home. I had like some bug spray, anything that you could think of, I had it in that middle thing and at the very bottom I just had my hats because if it was a lazy day and I didn't feel like doing anything to my hair, I would just throw my hat in it. So having this three tier really skinny organizer, if I can find the exact one, I will definitely link it in the description box below because it was probably the best purchase I had and on the top of it I was able to sit like this little rack thingy that I was going to hang up in my room, but I was just able to keep just miscellaneous stuff on it. Like right now it just has like a glasses kit, some chapstick, hair vitamins, like some ponytail holders, anything I would keep my headphones on it, like just anything I needed a quick grab when I'm running out the room. I would keep my keys sitting on it that I just knew whenever I needed something, I had an exact place I could go to and I would find it every time. So just the key to having a great room your freshman year and optimizing storage is just having a place for everything. It will make your life a whole lot easier. So that is pretty much it for this video. I really hope you guys enjoyed it. Like I said earlier, do not forget to go check out Lauren's channel over at La La Alexis and check out her amazing video. I really hope you guys enjoyed it. Don't forget to click that good old like and subscribe button and I will see you guys next time. Bye y'all.