College isn’t exactly something that most individuals would be quick to refer to as a “time of plenty.” When you’re working to complete your higher education and earn yourself a degree, no matter what kind of degree it might be, there’s a lot of important stuff that you’ve got to make sure you’re taking care of. Your responsibilities can be pretty intense, and this is intentional. The time that you spend working on your studies in college before you go out into the real world are supposed to teach you a lot of the things you’re going to need to know about existing all on your own once you’ve graduated. If you think college is busy, you’re going to be responsible for a lot more things when you’re done with it. This might seem a bit laughable to a student currently dealing with a full-time class load, but when you’re responsible for coming up with the money for rent and groceries each month, working enough hours each week can take up a pretty serious amount of your time. As such, it’s important to learn and build as many applicable life skills as you can before you’ve actually finished going to school. Home organization is most definitely one of these tools. We don’t all have the luxury of being able to live in an apartment while we’re in college, and many of us instead opt for the much more cramped dorm option. This is great practice, however, for keeping yourself organized when you get out into the real world. Your little dorm isn’t going to give you a whole lot to work with in terms of storage space, so we’re going to talk about how to make the most of what you’ve got, even when you don’t actually have very much to begin with.

One of the keys to making use of a small amount of storage space is going vertical. Use up as much vertical space as you can. Hang things on the back of your door, and on the closet doors. Build skinny shelving on the walls — it’s easily done and doesn’t take up much space. Hang things directly on the wall. Put netting on the ceiling and store things up there if you need to. The walls and ceilings are just begging for you to use them a bit more, and you can do yourself a serious favor in terms of storage if you do.

If you’ve got space under your bed that isn’t being put to good use, then you’ll be able to store some things under there if you don’t need to get to them on a regular basis. Items that you don’t need access to all the time can simply go under there so they don’t get in the way as you’re going about your business. When you’re dealing with a small dorm space, it can be tough to find a way to store all your stuff. Even if you’re working on an online MPH program and are looking ways to maximize the space you have in your bedroom at home, these ideas will help you store your things with the greatest of ease.