Your student accommodation can play a major role in completing your university life to give you a more pleasant experience. After all, this is your home away from home. When you go through long and tiring days at the university, the last thing you’ll want is to come home to your place that doesn’t speak the language of comfort. You can’t control the heavy workload that school inherently comes with, but you can control how you manage your experience by being happy where you retreat to.
So, it doesn’t hurt to tweak your Australian student accommodation to make it feel more like home.
Whether you’re going to shop for new household items from expensive shops or from a thrift store, there are many ways that you can transform your student housing, to make it feel more like home.
Here are some tips to consider:
1. Personalized Notice Board
Perhaps in your own room at home, you’ve got your own notice board by your study table. This may house some of your personal memories, family photos, movie or airline tickets, a bag tag from a memorable purchase, your class schedule, weekend to-do lists, among others. If you already have this, then bring it with you as you move to your university accommodation.
This can help make your room feel more personal – and remind you of your own room back at home. This serves both a good purpose as a décor for your room, and a functional one to keep you reminded of outgoings.
2. Prioritize Your Bed
Surely you can’t bring your bed with you to the university. It’s impractical given that it’s bulky. And, on school holidays when you go back home, where are you going to sleep if your room no longer has a bed?
So, it’s a given that one of your big purchases is your bed. When you head out to buy one, be very careful with your choice. Pay attention and buy a good mattress and bede, as comfort is one of the best reminders of home.
While you can’t bring your bed with you, surely you can bring pillows and sheets from home – so do so. This can give your student accommodation that home-grown TLC feeling.
3. Display Photos
As you do an ocular on your room, before you leave your home, you may also want to print out photos. There could be bare walls that you can fill up with photos or display cabinets for you to place this. Having photos of your family, friends and loved ones can give you that much-needed comfort when you do feel homesick. It can also boost your motivation when you feel like all the workload of university life is just getting to you.
There are plenty of unique and creative ways to display photos, so it’s up to you to make use of your creativity for this project.
4. Keep Your Floor Warm
There’s nothing home-y about a floor that makes you feel so cold once you step on it. Rather, you’ll want to continue to have that feeling of warmth when you get up in the morning and step on the floors.
A very good way to achieve this is by warming up the floors with a rug! This doesn’t have to be expensive. Even a cheap rug from home deco stores can do wonders in making this big difference in the comfort feeling.
5. Rearrange Existing Furniture
If you’ve got friends living in the same complex as you do, this means that you’ll notice every room to be identical. This is one of the characteristics of student housing accommodations wherein there’s very little room for personalization.
If the furniture can be moved around, then do so. This can give you that opportunity to rearrange your room as you please, to make it more attuned to your preferences. Then, that’s when you can start adding in the little bits and pieces to add up to the comfort level.
For example, you may want to add in a couch or a bean bag for those weekends when all you want to do is slouch, take a break from the school work and relax.
6. Put In Light Features
While it may be impossible to add permanent ceiling and wall lights for this pursuit, there are still so many ways for you to create that drama and dimension in your university accommodation by playing with the lighting.
One of these ways is through putting in light fixtures, usually in warm whites or warm yellows. Typically, these light fixtures can be string lights, a floor lamp, or even a nice-looking table or desk lamp.
Conclusion
With these tips, perhaps now you can be more excited to move out from your family home – into this very first experience of what it’s like to live away from home. When for many, this is your very first taste of independence, it’s understandable to have that daunting feeling of what it’s going to be like in your student accommodation. But, it doesn’t always have to feel that way. Spending four years in your student accommodation can form the best season of your life – some long-term memories and friendships for life. Begin this journey by being comfortable and make this new abode feel like home.