A girl’s guide on how to perfectly decorate your uni room

Your new uni room is the first chance to show your new pals what you’re all about, and here is our guide to help you master it. The key components of any girl’s uni room are only essential because you’re at uni.

You’d never have some of this in your home room, but you’re a ‘uni-gal’ now and its just a winning formula – we’re talking fairy lights, polaroids, and cacti. Don’t ask why we have them. If they don’t make an appearance in there somewhere then you can count your precious bedroom out for cozy movie Sundays.

Cacti and Fairy Lights = 2 out of 3 components

Before you arrive at uni you will no doubt panic over the state of the walls, the colour of the carpet and the size of the wardrobe. You spend nights praying that you’ll have clean magnolia rather than garish orange. Plus there’s the dreaded fear that the wardrobe won’t be big enough to store the massive Topshop haul you did before uni, and there’ll be no space for your precious camel coat.

Move-in day finally arrives and you will hopefully be overjoyed to see no orange in sight. Then the fun really starts as you are free to stick up all your photos from summer, that you, if you’re organised enough, will have already got developed from Jessops and double checked that all your friends appear an equal amount – just in case they come to visit.

Next you can (precariously) position your fairy lights around your bed or as a border for your ugly pin board, and maybe cover the pin board in decorative paper to make it that bit more appealing.

Then the most important bit of your room.

The alcohol shelf. You’re fully stocked up and you arrange your bright, shiny and full bottles to portray just how much you can, and will, drink.  Within two weeks the bottles will be empty, your liver will be ruined and you have freshers’ flu for what seems like the rest of your life, but for now, bring on the vodka and orange squash.

Get your parents to take you on one last trip to IKEA and persuade them to buy you an array of co-ordinating kitchen, bathroom and bedroom utensils. Stock up on posters and indie wall hangings which clearly say ‘I spent my gap yah discovering myself in Bali’ even though you actually spent it working at Tesco’s.

By the end of freshers, the posters will be covered in free drink flyers, free entry tickets and a giant calendar of all the club events until Christmas.

The all important alcohol shelf

Alcohol shelf complete.  Pinboard complete. Now grab a funky, colourful duvet (a double one even if your bed is single because = extra snuggliness) and fluffy pillows because there’s nothing like them. Get a £7 desk lamp from Argos and as many colourful ring binders as you can find because there’s something weirdly pleasing about having them all lined up on your shelf, even when they’re completely empty.

A desk complete with a laptop

Carefully arrange your teddies and countless cushions and get that all important photo of your new room, then snapchat it and send it to your mum who congratulates you on your decoration skills and declares how much she misses you, even though they haven’t even finished the drive back home yet. N.B. Be sure to have your laptop in place so your desk doesn’t look TOO empty.

Enjoy the cleanliness, organisation and general aesthetic of your room because within two days it will never look like this again, with VK-stained outfits thrown on the floor, the alcohol levels diminishing at the same rate as your sleep depravation in increasing. Your laptop will make the permanent move to your bed when you discover Netflix is a way better alternative to lectures.