Our storage solutions for two people in a studio on a TA budget

We've made a lot of changes in the apartment to make cohabitation possible, and I wanted to share a few of them.  Not bad for the super tight budget dictated by a meager TA salary, if I do say so myself.

1. I got as much little stuff off of horizontal surfaces as possible. This is one of my proudest and laziest DIYs: I tucked some cork board into this red picture frame of my mom's for a snazzy earring holder! Ah, craftiness.

2. We utilized tall shelf space to to its max, instead of wasting it with short stuff. Aren't our matching Mountain Hardware phantom sleeping bags sickeningly adorable? On the top shelf are the Costco sized cleaning products.

3. We got these shelves for free on Craigslist, scrubbed them off, cut them up, and mounted them with about twenty bucks worth of Home Depot hardware. Voila!  Closet for two.

4. We stacked the books to the extreme. Yes, this Ikea shelf will probably break eventually, but whatever.

5. We got shoe racks.  Definitely worth it.

Co-habitation in a studio: Fight noise with white noise

Poster from the Fight Noise with Noise campaign by artist Michael Horowitz.

My little desk is about four feet from our over-sized television, and it is not easy to do academic writing when Snooki and The Situation are screaming at each other in the background.  Sure I have an office on campus, but why would I want to lug myself up there every day when I have a workspace right here, 15 feet from my bed and 20 feet from my refrigerator?

Color block headphones by
Fred Flare.  Way cooler looking than
the ones my boyfriend bought.

My boyfriend recently purchased a pair of expensive noise-reducing headphones on the internet for a very good price, and I tried them out.  All they did was block out the white noise from the street, and make the voices of the people on the television easier to understand!  In desperation I tried to drown out the noise with iTunes, but I just can't think straight when I'm listening to music.

Enter SimplyNoise, my new best friend.  It's a free web app that plays either white noise, pink noise or brown noise at a volume of your choosing.  It will even oscillate the level for you, which is surprisingly soothing.  In case you were wondering (I was), the colors correspond to sound frequency profiles.  Just like with color, lower frequencies correspond to reds and pinks, and higher frequencies to blues and violets.  White noise (like color), is approximately the same levels of all frequencies.  It's all about the power spectrum!  Yay for fourier transforms!

Check out SimplyNoise at www.simplynoise.com.  They also sell iPod and iPhone apps.