When you’re preparing to move into your dorm or apartment, you’re probably frantically searching for tips and tricks to organize and decorate your new home. You might have already moved in and you’re just looking for a better way to make your space more like a home. Whatever the reason, if you haven’t already figured this out, command strips are your new best friend. Here’s the top six ways you can use command strips/hooks to organize and decorate.
1. Hanging up paintings and frames
I hate having bland walls, so I have tons of pictures and paintings hanging up. In lots of dorms and apartments, you’re not allowed to nail things up and push pins aren’t strong enough. So, you have to get creative when sprucing up your walls. That’s when command hooks come to the rescue. For paintings and frames, the best kind of command strip to use is the double sided velcro strips. I even used the double sided velcro to hang up my mirror!
2. Decorations
Like I mentioned before, I hate bland walls, so it’s important that I decorate my dorm in any way possible. You can hang up tapestries, flags and lights. The best kind to use is command hooks with a wire hook for mobility!
3. Shower
Seriously, dorm showers are so small! If you have your own bathroom or you share a bathroom with four other girls, there’s no room to put all of your shower gear. You can get a shower caddy, but then you have to set it on the floor and it doesn’t work out very well. You want to make sure you get command hooks that are meant for water though, otherwise they don’t stay up very well.
4. Convenience
Dorm rooms are SO small. If you don’t hang things up, you’ll end up piling things on the floor and it becomes a mess. Using command hooks to hang up your everyday things frees up floor space. You can hang up jackets, keys, hats, purses, etc. Whatever hook you prefer is fine, I even use some cheap knock-off brand ones for the lighter objects (which saves money). I also used the double sided velcro (as mentioned above) to stick a lighting strip to the wall so it wasn’t behind the TV and hard to reach.
5. Holding trash bags down
For a desk or bathroom trash bin, you don’t usually have a lid to keep the trash bag down. So, you have to constantly pull the trash bag back up. With this nifty trick, you’ll never have to pull the trash bag back up again. You just put the command hooks on upside down (you can use cheap knock-off ones if you want) and either use grocery shopping bags or poke holes in trash bags.
6. Hanging up plants
You always need some green in your apartment/dorm to make the place look lively. I never know what to do with small succulents. With command strips, you can hang them up on the wall to get them out of the way but still look cute. Just poke a hole in the plastic pot and hang it up with the wire hooks so you can take it off to let water drain.