Life After College: How to Make Your (Small) Place Feel Like a Home

You’ve scoured Craigslist. You’ve somehow coughed up the first, last and security deposit. And now you’ve unlocked the door to a tiny space with vast possibilities. Surround yourself with plants and skateboard in the living room. It’s your space.

— COZY apt. in Boulder duplex. Great location! ($1,250/mo.)

After they graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Reghan Gillman, 24, and TJ Moore, 24, decided to move in together. They had been dating for 2 1/2 years, and sharing a house was going to be a way to keep costs down. Gillman soon began to obsess over housing ads on Craigslist, checking the site, as she said, every five minutes for weeks.

They eventually stumbled on one side of a duplex in her favorite neighborhood. (She later realized that they had passed the house countless times during walks when they began dating.)

“We do sacrifice some things for this house, like absolute privacy and extra space, but in my mind you can’t beat the charm and location,” Gillman said.

The house is 400 square feet. “We’ve dubbed it the Shoe Box,” Gillman said.

“We don’t have much money, so we’ve done most things ourselves to make it feel like home,” she said.

Some things were big, like repainting the entire house, but most things were small, like placing plants on every possible surface — “Seriously, we’re drowning in plants!” — and putting travel souvenirs on display. For her birthday, Gillman asked for gift cards to her favorite stores so she and Moore could splurge on the bedroom.

Courtney Chinn’s mother found a studio apartment for her on Craigslist. Chinn, 24, signed a sublease for it sight unseen. It was something, she said, her new co-workers were quick to say probably wasn’t a great idea.

Chinn came to Washington from Tampa, Florida, in March for a job (she works in the sustainable-energy industry) and to live in a big city. But she’s been homesick, and travels back home every few weeks. Her apartment is dotted with her unpacked suitcases and boxes.

In the beginning, “I was living the air mattress life, which was absolutely terrible,” she said. A few weeks later, her mattress came in the mail, and only recently did she get a bed frame and a headboard to help her feel more like an adult.

Chinn finished graduate school in Florida in December 2017. “Funny thing is, I feel more like a freshman in college than anything else,” she said.

She has found that she has too much space in her 600-square-foot apartment and not nearly enough stuff to fill it. “I’m assuming tailgate camping chairs don’t count,” she said.

Chinn’s favorite purchase is a watercolor painting of the outline of Washington in rainbow colors. “I hung it in the kitchen, and even though I have no roots here yet, it makes me smile each morning,” she said.

Katie Mendoza, 23, and Kate O’Donnell, 24, connected on Craigslist in May 2017. Mendoza posted an ad for a roommate for her apartment on the ground floor of a historic home in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. They are now best friends.

The two decorate their refrigerator with photos of their nights out together, and since neither has family nearby, they rely on each other for emotional support.

Mendoza calls herself a “true millennial,” and she eats out for most meals. O’Donnell, on the other hand, often cooks.

In addition to being fun to look at, pictures of O’Donnell and Mendoza are meant to disguise wear and tear on their refrigerator. The windows on the wall were left on the street by neighbors and reclaimed by the roommates as art.

“Our house used to be offices for the Red Cross during World War I,” Mendoza said.

One quirk of living in a home that is more than 200 years old, she said, is that the brick walls shed. The two need to constantly clean their floors.

John McLearen, 26, lives where he does because of Snapchat.

A friend recently posted on the app that he was looking for someone to rent out a one-bedroom house in the midtown district of Oklahoma City. McLearen — who moved seven times across four cities in two years — hadn’t been looking for yet another move, but this place had it all. It was less expensive and in a cooler neighborhood than where he had been in the suburbs.

McLearen has a gun for bird hunting but, he said, having it in the bedroom also “helps me sleep a little better.”

This time was different, too. He was moving along with his girlfriend Megan, 26, who works as a nanny, and his dog, Tyson. “I don’t want to move again until I can buy my own place,” he said.

McLearen graduated from Central Oklahoma University, which is just outside Oklahoma City, in 2016. After moving to Tulsa and then Denver for work, with detours at his parents’ house along the way, he came back to Oklahoma City in May.

He left Denver with just what he could fit in his car, so his girlfriend has done most of the decorating in their new place. Two things, however, have traveled with McLearen throughout his many moves over the last couple of years: a globe that used to be his grandfather’s and a huge picture he bought at Ikea when he first moved out on his own and wanted to make the space feel like home.