My freshman year roommate was my best friend of 12 years. We were very comfortable with each other, but we still were concerned about privacy. Both of us are somewhat introverted and so we value time to ourselves to recharge. Being in a dorm can make that time really difficult to come by. We also just both agreed that privacy was a really important thing for each of us to maintain and that we needed to find a way to help give each other that.
I started looking into ways to make each of our beds more closed off. That led me to looking at pop-up tents that actually go underneath your bed and then you can pop them up so that you have a literal tent around your whole bed. Not only was this option not cute, but it also looked like they weren’t meant for putting up and taking down each morning and night. Their set up seemed complicated. I realized that I was going to have to get a little creative.
I decided to put up curtains on our bed frames so that we could close them at night, almost like shutting your bedroom door before you go to sleep. To do this, I went to Walmart and found long, white, black-out curtains. Then, I bought a long adjustable curtain rod for the long side of my bed, and two short adjustable curtain rods for the head and foot of my bed. The last thing I got for this was a package of command hooks (dorm lifesaver). All of this was a bit of a shot in the dark, hoping that the length of the curtains and rods would work. My roommate also bought all of the same curtains and rods so they would look cohesive.
On move in day, I realized that the head of my bed was up against a wall so I wouldn’t need to put up a curtain on that side. The only sides I needed to put curtains on were one long side of my bed, and the foot of my bed. I attached command hooks to the tops of the posts on the long side, and then also on the foot of my bed. I measured to make sure the rods and curtains were long enough, and I also measured to make sure the curtains were tall enough. The curtains ended up being a little long so I cut off a couple inches from the bottoms so they wouldn’t be bunched up on the floor. Then I just hung the curtains on the rods and put the ends on the command hooks! This worked perfectly and we were able to push the curtains open during the daytime, and then pull them closed when it was time to go to sleep. Another great thing that ended up working out was that we were able to uses the pieces of curtain fabric that we cut off from the ends as ties to tie back the curtains during the day. The end result was so cute and worked flawlessly for us. We got so many compliments on the set up too. A lot of people were very, very jealous! The total cost ended up being around $20 dollars, but the privacy granted was honestly priceless.