A few weeks ago, Erin Gates over at Elements of Style had the best blog post ever about her college dorm room. I thought that was totally awesome; it made me nostalgic for my college days and I had to dig around to find some photos on my mom’s computer from when I was in college.

I only lived in the dorms for my freshman year of college, at Pepperdine University. I was excited beyond anything to have that experience. The only bad surprise was that there was no air conditioning. Apparently I should’ve read between the lines when the college literature suggested that “small personal fans are very popular amongst the students living in oncampus housing.” Hmmm. People in Oklahoma don’t not have air conditioning. It’s a death sentence. So to move to California where this was an option was a little … shocking, to say the least.

I only had a roommate for the first semester. Wait, no, not even that long. She moved out on me at Thanksgiving, and then I was roommate-less the rest of the year (to my complete and utter joy). So I bunked the beds and always had the top bunk made up with my extra set of sheets. I hung all kinds of ephemera on the walls – maps of the Getty Center museum, magazine clippings about places I’d visited in LA, that sort of thing. Of course, old photos from home.

The first week in California, I went to Target and bought goofy plastic crates and these hanging lamps that were just sooo awful, but at least they were some kind of ambient light other than the awful fluorescent ceiling fixture that gave absolutely no light. Heck, even at 18 I needed lamps! Ha!

Um, do you see the stuffed animal on my bed in the background behind me. Nice.

These pictures below are from when I was packing up to move back at the end of the school year. I packed my car pretty tightly and shipped the rest back.

If I had it to do all over again, I’d probably not do anything too different, to be honest.  It was a nice enough dorm for what it was, and we girls all had fun, despite the occasional catfight over loud music or wayward boyfriends showing up in the showers (!).

When I moved back to Oklahoma to attend OU, I got an apartment and I didn’t move out until I graduated. I lived on my own in a one-bedroom on the bottom floor of the apartment building, on the edge of town, not too far from campus. There was a little patio where I would regularly deposit bags of trash until I couldn’t stand it anymore and had to take it out to the trash dump. Isn’t that college for you??  The kitchen was tiny, but I felt like it was my own little dollhouse and I was just the queen of the castle.  My parents and siblings helped me move in, and I started collecting various pieces of Target furniture, as well as the requisite IKEA stuff too.  That coffee table in the photo (above) was the first piece of “real” (ha!) furniture that I purchased for myself. It was from West Elm and it’s still in our living room today. I bought it with prize money from a poster contest that I won for the Oklahoma State Medical Association.

I’ll have to dig up other photos somewhere – I know I’ve got them around somewhere.

There you have it – a nice little trip down memory lane. What was your dorm or apartment like?