Decorating, College-Boy Style

By Denise Adams

While preparing our 18-year-old to live in his first apartment, he promised he wouldn't come home with a couch from the dump. We both laughed, remembering the manner in which his oldest brother decorated his first college dorm room.

It seems like just yesterday Nick was calling from College Station, the excitement barely contained in his voice.

"We found a couch for our dorm room, and it was free!" said Nick. He explained that he and his roommate were on their way to the grocery store and they saw this great couch. It was free, so they hauled it back to their dorm room.

"Why was it free?" I asked.

"Because it was at the dump!" he said. "Can you believe how lucky we are!"

Shuddering at the number of germs living in that couch, I consoled myself with the knowledge that dumpster diving is considered art in some corners of the world. One person's trash is another person's treasure, so I decided to hold off on judging the couch until I got a good look at it.

The next weekend, our family headed up to College Station with the last few items for Nick's room, and he was thrilled when we called to say we were in the lobby. As he escorted us down the hall to his room, I noticed quite a few things had changed since my college days.

Instead of metal bunk beds with wafer-thin mattresses, today's students sleep in modular bedding systems. The fish nets that adorned every corner of a student's room have been replaced by five-foot high CD and DVD towers. Gone are the cinder-block bookshelves holding lava lamps, troll dolls and Royal manual typewriters. Modern students have fully outfitted computer stations with DVD, iPOD and MP3 players at their finger-tips.

I braced myself for my teen-ager's room, and it was your basic mom nightmare. Scattered about were the essentials of a boy's college dorm room - Playboy magazines he hastily claimed were his roommate's and then proceeded to shove underneath his pillow - and a mound of dirty clothes in one corner of the room.

Potato chip crumbs littered the floor, and posters of every female sex symbol were duct taped to the walls. Unpacked boxes served as chairs, but at least his toothbrush was damp in the holder by the sink (yes, I checked).

And in all its glory was that couch. At one time, the tweed material was an orange and brown flowered print. Over the years, the colors had mutated together into a shade resembling a rusted tin barn. The couch looked a bit strange, however, because the cushions were black, shiny vinyl.

"The cushions were pretty gross, so we took these black leather ones off another couch somebody was throwing away. Doesn't it look great!" he said with pride.

My two youngest boys thought it did and immediately parked their bodies on Nick's lucky find. I leaned over to them and whispered, "Don't put your head on the back of the couch; there could be lice," as I managed a fake "isn't everything just peachy" Mom smile.

Despite the cramped space in the room, the boys had managed to create a few homey touches - pictures of family and friends were in places of honor and the beds were made. Nick was a gracious host, and I laughed to myself when he offered us an off-brand soda and generic chips, things he never touched when he lived at home.

"Name brands cost way too much," he explained.

As he showed his brothers how loud the stereo would go, I caught my husband's eye from across the room — a distance of perhaps two feet — and mouthed the words, "I could never live like this again," and he nodded in agreement.

We smiled at each other, remembering when we were 18 years old, a small cramped dorm room was a veritable paradise, and Nick was just beginning to experience those carefree, once-in-a-lifetime days of young adulthood.

"Well, I don't mean to rush you, but I've got an appointment at five today," said Nick with a smile. We told him we were just leaving and congratulated him on being quite the responsible college man, attending meetings even though classes hadn't started.

As we walked down the hall, a male voice called out, "Nick, don't forget about the dorm mud wrestling event with the girls at five today." We looked at our son with raised eyebrows.

"You told me not to spend all of my time studying," Nick said with a sheepish grin.

As we drove away from the curb, my youngest son sighed.

"I can't wait until I'm in college so I can get to live in a great room like Nick's, mud wrestle and find great couches at the dump," he said.

I suppose that's one way to make sure he gets a college degree. In the Lone Star State, we're known for our "Texas T" that, for my Aggie son at least, stands for "Trash Treasures."

Denise Adams is a weekly columnist with The Herald-Coaster newspaper in Rosenberg, Texas and can be reached via e-mail at dhadams@herald-coaster.com.