Clean Your College Dorm Room With This Easy Checklist

Dorm rooms are small. The average college dorm room is between 125-250 square feet, and if you’re sharing it with a roommate, that doesn't leave much room for personal space.

Now, you might think it sounds easy to keep such a small space clean, but if you don’t stay on top of it, grime, germs, and clutter can get out of control — and before you know it, you’ve got a biology experiment growing in your coffee cup.

This year, especially, it’s important to keep things clean in your dorm room, including disinfecting daily and minimizing clutter, to reduce the risk of Covid and other germs. This guide covers it all and will help you keep your college crib ship-shape all semester long.

Avoid standard cleaners that release toxic chemicals into the air, and opt for natural cleaners, which are just as effective and smell pretty sweet too.

To keep clutter to a minimum, come to college armed with storage solutions, such as file boxes for papers, storage cubes, and caddies for toiletries and cleaning supplies.

Make sure your roommate and you agree on a cleaning strategy that will keep you organized and your room tidy.

Start with the Golden Rule of clutter control: Have a place for everything, and always put things back in their place.

How often you should break out your cleaning supplies depends on a few things — how much time you have, how messy you are, the nature of the messes, and how sensitive you are to clutter. A better question might be, “How can I keep my dorm room clean?” That way, you’re focused on maintenance, so it’ll never get out of hand.

Breaking maintenance down into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks makes it quick ’n’ easy to keep a clean environment.

Make it easy to keep your room clean with our handy at-a-glance dorm cleaning checklist, which you can hang on your bulletin board or door.

One final tip: Think of a time during your day when you’re free but still in get-it-done mode. Use just 15 minutes of that time to do your daily chores and take care of other important personal tasks. That way, you can put it completely out of your mind for the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day.

Life happens, especially in college, and there may be a couple of times (okay, probably lots of them) when cleaning your dorm room is the very last thing on your mind. Things may get a little out of hand, and you can be sure that as soon as that happens, your parents (or worse, your crush) will surprise you with a visit. The worst thing you can do is panic-clean, which is basically just throwing things in random places. So take a deep breath, center yourself, and then leap into focused action, completing each of the following tasks in this order:

1. Gather up all the clothes and put them in your hamper.
2. Grab a garbage bag, and toss in all of the trash in the room. Empty the bin under your desk. Empty the fridge in case your guests are bringing snacks. Take the bag to the trash outside.
3. Collect all of your dirty dishes, and put them in your dish tub. Put the dish tub somewhere people can't see it.
4. Make your bed.
5. Tidy up your desk. Stack up loose papers and notebooks, put away your pens, and straighten your devices.
6. Sweep or vacuum, whichever is fastest.

1. Keep clutter to a minimum. The less you have piled up on surfaces, the less dust will be generated, and the easier it will be to clean.
2. Dust weekly. Use a damp cloth, electrostatic duster, or microfiber duster to trap dust rather than just move it around.
3. Vacuum weekly. A broom can leave a lot of dust behind, but a vacuum will remove the majority of it. Invest in a small vacuum cleaner, or better yet, program a robotic vacuum to remove dust while you’re away.
4. Wash your bedding each week. You shed an alarming number of dead skin cells each night as you toss and turn. And we won’t even mention the hundreds of thousands of dust mites that feast on all that dead skin in your bed. Keeping your bedding clean will help reduce dust — and the allergies that come with it.
5. Invest in an air purifier. An air purifier removes dust and allergens from the air before they land on your stuff.

1. Open a window. Exchanging old indoor air for new, outside air will help keep your dorm room smelling fresh.
2. Absorb odors. Place a container of charcoal or baking soda in places that tend to become smelly — the closet, the fridge, where you hang your towels.
3. Mask the odor. Avoid synthetic air fresheners, which are full of toxic chemicals. Instead, use a natural air freshener or essential oil diffuser to change your stinky room into a relaxing, fragrant haven that’s free of harmful substances.

It’s no fun living with someone who's super messy and never cleans up, but dealing with a filthy dorm mate is good practice for working through conflicts later on. The first step is to talk to your roommate with these tips:

• Talk when you aren’t feeling frustrated.
• Don’t accuse your roommate of being a slob, even if it’s true.
• Make it about you: “You’ve probably noticed that I like things clean ...”
• Choose your battles. What makes you the most crazy? Is it the stacks of dishes? The clothes strewn across the floor? Bring it up: “… so I’m wondering if you’d do me a big favor and keep your clothes off the floor.”

If that doesn’t work, maybe your roommate just needs a helping hand. Suggest a group cleaning session a few times a week, put on a rockin’ playlist, follow a checklist so you each have tasks, and see how much cleaning you can get done together in 15 minutes.

If your roommate is totally not into that, divide the room in half — use tape if you have to — and ask your roommate to limit messes to their own side of the room. Whenever their stuff encroaches on your space, gently place it back over on their side. Maybe they’ll learn, maybe they won’t, but try not to let it ruin your life or your relationship.