An artful dorm room

When I drove my daughter back to school last week I helped her unpack and tidy up her room a little and I took a few photos. She rents a room in a sorority house. It is a big old house with three stories and a kitchen on each floor. It is not in the best shape but you can tell in its day it was really something.

There are some wonderful elements left over from the house's glory days. Like these great door knobs. 

She shares the bottom floor with one other girl and they have a living room with a television to hang out in and they have the kitchen to themselves except when the rest of the 'house' cooks together one night a week. There is a fireplace in the TV room and it has a beautiful old mantle on it.

Her room is the tiniest little room but it is all hers. The last two years she shared a room with someone else so having her own room is a move up. It came furnished and with 4 different colors of paint on the walls. Apparently they have allowed every girl who rented the room before her to paint however they wanted. One girl basically painted around the furniture. So the first thing we did when she moved in was re-paint the walls all one color.  She selected a nice blue paint color for the walls and a new duvet cover and desk chair from Ikea. 

Here is the room when she first moved in ... freshly painted:

When I was up there this last visit I had to smile when I saw her walls because there is not much left of the wall showing; she has covered it with things she loves and a lot of her own artwork. It is fabulous ... a perfect college student's 'dorm' room: 

I love that she is her own person and did not buy into my minimal and mostly white esthetic. For her, the more colorful the better. She is extremely neat and organized (the part of her that is like me) which helps  in such a small space.

In her freshman year she lived in the dorms and the walls were lined with message boards so she covered the wall easily by using push pins. When she moved out, she took everything off the walls and put them on canvas boards to save it.

Freshman dorm room wall

Dorm room wall transferred to canvas

New art wall

An art project

Another art project - public transportation!

And since I left her last weekend ... she has been busy creating even more. She took down her plain white paper lantern and added some paint. I LOVE it! 

How creative!