Moving into college can be one of the most exciting — and stressful — times in a young person's life. Meeting roommates, finding classrooms, trying dining hall food for the first time -- these are just some of the experiences guaranteed. Having a comfortable dorm room, even if it's the size of a shoebox, is crucial to truly making college feel like home. With the help of a few online sites, you can ensure you're new room is unique and filled with all the things you love.
Planning your space
Take the guesswork out of moving into college with Designyourdorm.com, an interactive website that features dorm layouts of more than 140 colleges and universities across the country. The site features 3D versions of every dorm and floor layout on your college's campus and once you choose the style of room you'll be living in, you can virtually add furniture, rugs and decorations to see how the room will look. Not only is this a great tool to check and see whether or not that futon will fit before you even buy it, but your roommates can also access the design so you can literally plan how your dorm will look before you even get there. The site also doubles as a shopping site, so all the furniture pieces you virtually place in the room can be added to a shopping cart, purchased and shipped directly to your dorm.
Making it your own
For many people, moving into college means one thing: a trip to Ikea, the furniture powerhouse. While Ikea features low-price, easy-to-assemble furniture options, most only come in bland colors like black and white. In order to spruce up your Ikea purchases and create a unique dorm space, the geniuses at Thisismykea.com have come up with a creative solution. Mykea featues all of Ikea's furniture inventory. Once you pick the piece of furniture you recently purchased, you can choose from hundreds of design covers made by Mykea designers just like you.
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Mykea offers peel-off stickers to easily apply to your Ikea furniture. If you don't like any of the designs available, you can even come up with your own and upload it to the site. As long as the jpg-format art is high resolution enough, Mykea will take care of the rest and make the furniture stickers. If other people decide to use your design, you will make money every time it is downloaded. If putting stickers on your brand new furniture sounds less than appealing, you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that Mykea's designs don't leave behind any residue. If you place the sticker but decide you don't like its look, you can easily remove it and start again.
