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Dorm Room Pinboard Ideas: Build a Wall You'll Actually Use

Every dorm room starts the same way. One bed, one desk, and a wall. It's the loudest echo you'll ever hear. You could cover it with posters. Almost...

Every dorm room starts the same way. One bed, one desk, and a wall. It's the loudest echo you'll ever hear.

You could cover it with posters. Almost everyone does. But three weeks in, the tape gives up, one corner curls, and now you need to replace the poster. Who wants to replace their wall decor that often?

Start with a pinboard instead. It gives you the same color on the wall, plus somewhere to put your life!

A pinboard earns its wall space

A poster looks at you. A pinboard works for you.

Pin the class schedule you keep forgetting. The photo strip from the first week. The concert ticket you are absolutely keeping. The birthday card from your grandma. The sticky note that says "CALL MOM", which will stay there all semester.

Our felt pinboards mount with adhesive tabs, so it's as easy as pinning up your poster; nothing needs a nail, a screw, or a drill. Good news for your walls, and for whoever inspects them.

Felt beats cork, and it is not close

If you grew up with a cork board above a desk, you know how it ends. Crumbs in the carpet. A little gray patch of holes where you pinned the same thing forty times. Beige, always beige.

Felt holds up better:

  • Pins go in and come out without shedding or crumbling
  • A half-covered board still looks deliberate, not unfinished
  • It comes in real colors and shapes, not one shade of brown
  • It is soft, so a wall of it feels warmer than a wall of nothing

Pick a shape. Or three.

There are arches, scallops, clouds and topo curves, and that's just the start. Felt Right makes a lot of designs, and here is the part most people miss: every felt tile is pinnable!

Any design you like off the main collection can hold pins. So the checkerboard you liked for the color is also a pinboard. The pencil design is also a pinboard. The one shaped like a cloud is, obviously, also a pinboard.

Which means you are not choosing between a wall that looks good and a wall that is useful. Pick the colors you actually want and let them do both jobs.

Three ways to lay it out

Above the desk. One board, centered, at eye level when you are sitting. This is the workhorse. Schedule, deadlines, the printout of the reading you keep meaning to do.

The gallery cluster. Three or four tiles in mixed shapes and colors, grouped loosely rather than in a neat grid. Photos go on all of them. It fills a lot of wall for not much money and it is the one people ask about.

The full feature wall. Cover the wall behind your bed and treat the whole thing as pinnable. Ambitious, extremely photogenic, and a good group project with a roommate who has the same idea.

Lay everything on the floor first. Move it around until it looks right. Then put it up. Trying to compose a wall while holding a tile above your head is a bad time.

Sharing a room, keeping a corner

When you split a room with someone, the wall above your desk is one of the few things that is entirely yours. A pinboard makes that obvious, and no one has to say anything.

Pick your colors, they pick theirs, and the room stops looking like it came out of a catalog and more like you.

Move-in day and move-out day

Setup is quick. Clean the wall, stick on the tabs, press the tile flat, keep going. Most walls are done in under an hour and you will not need a single tool.

Two honest notes before you order.

The felt is durable and comes down at the end of the year to go up in your next place. The adhesive tabs are single use, so grab a fresh peel-and-stick adhesive set when you reinstall. They are inexpensive and it is the one thing people forget.

Dorm walls vary. The standard tabs grip best on smooth, clean, finished surfaces. If your room is rough cinderblock or freshly painted, test one tile in a small spot before you commit to a whole wall, and check the adhesive options so you start with the right ones.

Leave room for fun

You do not have to fill the whole wall with responsibilities. A wall game like tic-tac-toe or checkers gives you something to do between finishing a reading and procrastinating to start the next one. It stays on the wall instead of disappearing under the bed, which is where every card game goes to die.

Start with one

You do not need to plan the whole room in August. Put up one pinboard above the desk, live with it for a couple of weeks, and add to it when you know what the wall needs. That is the nice thing about tiles. The wall can grow with the year.

Browse the felt pinboards collection to find your shape, or start with a color sample kit if you want to see the shades in person first.