One of the best things you can do to keep your dorm room experience positive is to keep your room clean. You won’t be able to just show up at college, move into your room, trash it, and move out. You have to leave it in the condition you found it, and you’ll be much more comfortable if you keep it clean in between move-in and move-out.
Here’s a list of things to do (and some cleaning supplies to have) to keep your room in an acceptable condition.
1. Many dorm rooms have hard floors—if this is the case, you’ll want to sweet it fairly often. You’ll be eating in your room, so you’ll be adding crumbs to the pencil eraser shavings and other byproducts of an academic existence on your floor. After a while, it builds up. So sweep it!
If you have carpeting, or put rugs over your hard floor, make sure to vacuum as well. After a while, it becomes pretty easy to tell if carpet has been vacuumed or not.
2. If you have a kitchen in or near your room, bring dishwashing supplies, because dishes that haven’t been washed in two weeks are gross.
Wash your dishes right after you use them, or when they start building up in the sink, and you’ll avoid the telltale nasty smell of moldy dishes.
If you’re fortunate enough to have a dishwasher, you won’t have to worry about this—just be sure to use the dishwasher!
3. Another thing you’ll want to bring for your kitchen (and bathroom, if you have one) is surface cleaner. Something like Scrubbing Bubbles or another high-powered grime remover is perfect. Use it on your counters, sinks, oven, tub, stove, shower, toilet, and any other hard surface. It’ll take anything built up right off—you won’t even have to scrub (unless it’s impressively baked on there).
This is also really effective for taking stains off of a hard floor—if you drop some tomato sauce or cheese on your floor and don’t notice it until the next morning, this will take it right off.
4. A non-cleaning product that will really help the clean-seemingness of your apartment is an air freshener. Get one that plugs into the wall, a gel diffuser, or any other kind (hanging the evergreen tree car air fresheners isn’t very stylish, but they definitely work!), and put them up in your room.
You can find discrete places to put them if you’d like, or make it really obvious—it doesn’t really matter. Just use something to keep your dorm room smelling alright.
While you may not enjoy cleaning, it’ll pay off. Especially when it comes to cleaning your room out at the end of the year. Not only will your dorm look and smell better than a lot of the ones you’ll see, but you’ll already be a step ahead when it comes to doing the major clean when you move out.
We all know it sucks to clean, but just do it, and you’ll be happy you did!