Create Your Inspirational Room

(Image: homedit)

Look around your room now. How does your room look currently? How do you feel whenever you’re in your room? Is it a place that inspires you? Or do you feel “blah” about it?

The Importance Of Your Room

Many people don’t spend much thought or time when setting up their room. They see it as just a place to sleep and do their stuff. Yet your room is a place of significant importance, for two reasons:

1. You spend a huge amount of time here throughout your life. We spend about one-third of our lives sleeping. Add in the times when you stay at home after school/work and during weekends, and it becomes clear that your room is one of the places you spend the most time in.
2. A lot of important thinking and decisions are made here. Chances are a lot of introspection, goal setting, planning,and  self-evaluation take place inside your room. This can be when you are conversing with friends online, emailing, doing work, etc.

Given that, it’s crucial to invest the time and effort to create a room that inspires you. If you are going to spend so much time here, wouldn’t it make sense to turn it a place you love to be in? In that sense, your room becomes a very vital tool to achieve your goals.

Some people have a separate study room and bedroom. The same principles apply, in that you want to create a conducive environment for sleeping, working, or whatever purpose you use your room for.

What Is Your Ideal Room?

What is your ideal room? What is an inspiring room to you is different to another. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you enjoy spending time in your room? Do you look forward to going back here at the end of every day?
• Does you feel excited being in this room?
• Does it provide you with a peace of mind, absent of stress and anxiety?
• Does it help you be effective when doing your tasks?
• Does it help you think logically and rationally? Does it trigger the creative, visionary part of yourself?
• Do you see your ideal self living here?

Based on the above, visualize your ideal room. How is it like? As you do that, consider the following aspects. In your ideal room, what would they be like?

1. Area space of the room
2. Layout (positioning of furniture, objects)
3. Type of furniture (your bed, wardrobe, bookshelf, desk, bedside table, etc.)
4. Objects inside your room (lamp, fan, books, clothes, bed, bedsheets, stationery, amount of clutter, etc.)
5. Free space (for walking around)

Now, take a look at the current state of your room. Is it roughly the same, or different? If it is different, how different is it? What are the immediate changes you can make to create your ideal vision of your room? What are the changes you can make in the long term?

#1 and #3 tend to be changes you can effect in the long term, while #2, #4 and #5 can be worked on in the short-term. In particular, #4 – amount of clutter is something that can be addressed immediately. This can be in the form of removing old books, random junk, infrequently worn clothes, anything that you do not have a use for but is around ‘just in case’ you need to use it in the future. Many times, we keep a lot of things which we think we’ll use in the future, but never do.

How I Revamped My Room

My room in the past

My room used to be highly messy and disorganized. Clothes, things and books were just strewn everywhere. My worn clothes would typically be piled up at a random surface area. My textbooks and notes (I was still studying at university then) would be stacked up on the floor. My table was quite untidy. While it served its function well as my study/bedroom, I never did feel completely homey in it – It didn’t feel in sync with my self-identity. It wasn’t a place I would jump with excitement to be in, save for the fact that I get my own privacy to do what I want inside. There would be times when I felt emotionally and mentally stifled inside. I was not very proud of it and it wasn’t a place where I would openly invite my friends to come and hang out in.

Making the decision to change my room

In mid-2007, I was setting up a working space in my room for my office work, since my ex-company had a work-from-home option where we could spend one day a week working from our own homes. At that time, I thought I might as well be take this chance to re-do my whole room. After all, if I’m going to be spending a good portion of my life for the next few years in this room, why not invest proper time and energy to turn it around into a place where I would deeply relish every single moment of being in it?

Making the change

With that, I set the vision in place for my ideal room which is exquisite, uplifting, pretty and homey.

I started off with a massive spring cleaning. I threw out a huge volume of unwanted things including clothes which I don’t wear, books (I couldn’t believe that I was still keeping textbooks and notes from back in secondary school), my old table which were not conducive for my work, random junk, non-working stationery, clutter, and so on. For the old books, letters, cards, miscellaneous things etc which I wanted to retain as keepsake, I put them inside very convenient storage boxes and placed them underneath my bed.

Then, with the help of my dad, we shifted the remaining furniture around to a layout which fully maximized the space in my room. I bought new furniture (table, lamp, printer, bedside table), new stationery, among many other things. I got a bedside table because I always thought it would be nice to have one where I can both fall asleep to and wake up to nice flowers as well as photos of me and my best friends. I placed flowers, potpourri, curtains and decorations all around the room to create a homey atmosphere. I exhibited all of my favorite gifts from my friends over the years. All these decisions were made based on what matched my ideal room vision.

Since I was busy working in the weekdays, I could only work on my room during the weekends. All in all, this whole change took about 2 months to complete.

An end result which paid off

The net result is a completely overhauled room and my own haven where I absolutely relish spending every single moment in. Just spending time in my room makes me feel extremely vitalized, inspired and exuberant, on top of my normal self! In fact, I was so proud of my accomplishment that I even threw a room warming party where my friends came over to celebrate and hang out :D

Pictures of My Room

Here, I will share with you selected pictures of my room :) They were all taken in Jan first 2008, but generally everything still looks pretty much the same as in the pictures.

This is my work desk. This is where I’m at when I’m using the internet, the computer and/or working on the site :D My laptop is now a pink Dell which I bought late last year at a computer fair. The mushroom at the back is the mushroom from Super-Mario Brothers, a classic game which I enjoyed playing from my childhood :D It’s actually a tissue paper holder. The globe you see to the right of the mushroom can be lit by a switch. I use to mark the places I’ve been to and to serve as a reminder of other places I want to visit someday in the future.

The lamp, which I bought from Ikea, is quite flexible – it can be rotated around and shifted up/down. There’s a full length mirror on the left of the table, which is not very visible in this picture. The printer on the right has been shifted to below my desk so I can have more space to put other things.

This is my notice board in front of my work desk :D It’s a corkboard which I use it to pin up inspirational quotes and articles which interest me at the moment. Two of the articles on right now are ’10 Tips To Become A Water Walker’ and ‘Seven Characteristics of Top Talent’. All the background and flowers you see on the noticeboard were actually manually stuck on by me.

The chair I sit on to work. The pink back cushion is a birthday gift from my friend last year. The little puppies underneath the bed are my bedroom slippers.

These are the outer doors of my wardrobe. I put up photos of all my best memories, my best/good friends, my colleagues, my oversea travels, birthday celebrations, and so on. Since this picture was taken in Jan 2008, there are actually about double the photos now than you see here. Whenever I looking at these pictures, I’m instantly reminded of all the wonderful moments in my life. It makes me grateful for everything that has transpired and excites me in what’s to come on next :D

Some ornaments I hang around to decorate the room. :)

My clothes, organized and arranged by segments inside my wardrobe. I have folded them to make them more compact and save space.

One of the shelves of my bookshelf. These are my graduation photos. (The left one is my graduation photo from kindergarten – with really short hair! The right one is from university).

The tortoises are birthday gifts from my friends (back then we were totally addicted on Gunbound which is a multiplayer 2-D side-scrolling shooting game. One of the bots I used very often was the turtle.)

My bed :) That’s two Elmos you see on the bed – the big one, which is a birthday gift from a friend when I was 15, and the small one on my pillow, which I have had since I was born.

A closer look at the table beside my bed. The lamp is a touch-based lamp which I really like. It lights up to varying brightness with each touch on the metal base. I got it at a night market a few years ago and always thought it was quite a steal for the price it was selling at. The photos here are with my group of close friends from since secondary school days whom I’ve known for almost a decade.

I also have my journal below the glass surface of the table. However nowadays I just journal in my computer since it’s more efficient.

The ceiling of my room where I’ve stuck over 60 stars! These stars glow in the dark, so every night I fall asleep to a starlit sky :) I wanted to get a picture of stars when it’s dark but my camera wasn’t able to capture the light.

How Can You Make Your Room More Inspiring Today?

Should you reduce your clutter? Should you shift your furniture around? Should you get furniture and objects that fit you better? How can you be taking little steps today to make your room more conducive? While this time and energy may seem to be huge investments in the beginning, bear in mind that this will become a very worthwhile investment which will pay off in spades in the long run. :)

Be sure to check out:

• Day 12 of 30DLBL Course: Create Your Inspirational Space
• Room Tour + Create Your Inspirational Room [Video, 2011 Edition]
• Room Tour + Create Your Inspirational Workspace [Video, 2015 Edition]