The change to university accommodation is a major transition for everyone, it takes time to adjust and can sometimes be quite hard – one way to make it a little easier is to personalise your room as a home away from home. This doesn’t have to be an expensive venture and hopefully this article will provide you with some budget ideas. Here’s to making your room the best environment for online learning, relaxing and enjoying this precious time!

Fairy Lights:

They are a particularly great addition because they can really transform a room, whether that be adding cosiness through warmer lights or multi-coloured lights to jazz it up. Fairy lights are affordable, but it is recommended that you buy battery pack lights for safety reasons. They are an easy way to totally change the vibe of a room and brighten up a space, particularly in winter.

Desk Area:

This area is the key study space of many student rooms and it should be decorated in a way to reflect this, the use of colourful containers and jars for stationary helps to organise your workspace in a more exciting way. Another key organisation item is a wall calendar, which is the perfect addition for your desk area because not only is it nice decoration, but it helps you stay organised too! The fact that it is so visual ensures you can properly make the most from the University experience because it gives something to work for, a sense of purpose to complete the current activity within the dedicated time framework.

Photographs:

Photographs are a particularly exciting way to pull your room together; pictures of friends and family remind us of happy times, which is crucial as University can get lonely. When framed they can be a great addition to a desk space and when individually printed, they can go perfectly on walls and wardrobes.

Knick-Knacks:

To liven up a room I would recommend adding colour to typically plain items, this could be funky duvet colours with particularly colourful and exciting patterns or brightly coloured cushions and blankets. Another way to achieve this is through different coloured towels or a bright laundry basket, these little touches take areas from boring to brilliant and culminate together to give the overall impression of the room.

Posters:

There are many options for wall decorations from maps to posters, they can be bought relatively cheap from many second-hand sites or from around Leeds. However, there are also less expensive ways of achieving this; for example, I printed off my favourite album covers, different quotes that inspired me and even twitter posts I particularly enjoyed. I then backed these onto multi-coloured card, but you could definitely leave them as they are, and used command-strips to stick them onto the wall. I found this to be a wholesome way to decorate my room with something that I love and which reflects my personality.

Header image credit: Jasmine Blatherwick