Buying a Mattress for Your Dorm Room & Tips for Saving Space

Dorm rooms vary in size depending on several items, such as if it is on campus, the college you attend and how many students there are per room.

Dorm room sizes vary greatly within the same university and even within one dorm. Most universities have smaller dorm areas for freshmen with two people per room and then the room size gets larger with seniority. A tour of the campus dorm room you will be in can help you get a good idea of the space you will have there. Some seniors can even have a triple dorm room all to themselves. Most dorms are either rectangular or square.

Room Measurements

Find the size of your dorm room from your tour information on information online about your dorm. It is usually expressed in whole feet, such as 10 feet by 12 feet or 15 feet by 15 feet. Determine if you are sharing the room with one or more persons to figure out your amount of the room that is designated for your use. Get the total area of the room and divide it by the amount of roommates. For example, if your room is 15 feet square, multiply 15 x 15 for a total area of 225 feet. Divide it by two if you are sharing the room with one other person to arrive at your total space of 112.5 square feet. Now, convert your area of square footage into inches, because the mattress sizes are expressed in inches. Multiply 12 times 112.5 square feet to get your total area in inches of 1350 square inches.

Common Dorm Room Mattress Sizes

The most common dorm room mattress sizes are twin, full and queen. A twin mattress is 39 inches wide by 75 inches long. A full mattress is 54 inches wide by 75 inches long. A queen size mattress measures 60 inches wide by 80 inches long.

If your room is on the small side to accompany two persons, most dorms have a bed frame made of tall sides with slats on the head and foot to loft your bed. This raises your bed up higher off the floor so you have ample space underneath the bed for items, such as a desk, small refrigerator, bean bag chair or storage containers that don’t fit in your closet.

If your dorm room does not include this loft type of bed frame, you can still create more space by using bed risers. You simply slide each leg of the bed frame onto a riser and instantly create up to 8 inches of under bed storage for excess clothing or other items. There is a huge selection of under bed storage crates, drawers and boxes. Some of the newer style bed risers have electrical outlets in them for extra cords to plug in when you have no access to wall outlets because your bed is likely pushed up against a wall.

More Space Saving Hacks

Hang over the door shoe organizers on your closet door to store shoes, scarves and accessories without the need for extra floor or drawer space.

Create extra vertical space in your closet by pulling off soda can tabs and inserting them on one hanger’s hook. You then add an additional hanger in the tab and keep building downward from there to hang many items in the space of one in the closet.

Smaller dorm rooms can be quite crowded and make it difficult to know which electrical power cord goes to what item. You can put a small piece of tape on each cord and label it with the item it goes to such as lamp, computer and clock cords. This allows you to know which item you are unplugging at all times, since you more than likely won’t have enough room to plug all appliances in at the same time.

If you are worried that your dorm room seems very small, remember what the origin of the word is. It comes from the Latin words dormire and ormiturn which translates into English as “to sleep.” You will most likely spend little time in your room when you have a full schedule except when you are in bed.