So, you’ve graduated college. You’ve gotten an apartment, probably with three other people, but the point is you have a living space that you pay rent on with some kind of job, where you can bring the person of your preferred gender back to and not have to hang a sock on the door to keep your roommate from barging in. You are, semi-officially, a grown-up. Yet your room still looks like you’re getting a food plan and about to go throw frisbees on the quad. Here’s how to fix that. Buy Some Real Furniture

We’re not saying you need to go down to the local Oak Hut and buy a bedroom set–in fact that’s probably a bad idea. But it is a good idea to take a look at the furniture you own, and replace anything you stole off the curb and hosed with Lysol a few years back when you needed a bookcase. Again, it can be cheap crap made by tax-dodging Norwegians: nobody in their right mind is going to refuse to sleep with you because you hit up Ikea for a few bookshelves. It just needs to be assembled properly, and not look like it’s about to collapse. This goes double for your bed, by the way. You don’t need a headboard: those steel rail frame things will do you, and even better, they’re dirt cheap. Or, why goof around? Go to the hardware store, get some sandpaper, lumber, stain, varnish and a saw and make your own bookcases. Just, again, it’s important that they don’t look like third grade popsicle art projects.

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Get Some Sheets That Match

Again, you don’t have to be Martha Stewart, or that gay Southern guy on PBS who seems like he wants to be Martha Stewart to the point of having a skin suit made out of her. You just need to go to the store, find some sheets you won’t be embarrassed about, and buy them. As a rule, the higher the thread count the better: don’t skimp. Of course, if somebody tries to sell you a duvet, or a cover for a duvet, you’re well within your rights to laugh at them for taking this crap too seriously and walk off with your sheets in a plastic cube. If you were wondering, a duvet is a comforter that crazy people buy because you have to wash the cover, and they lead sad, unfulfilled lives.

Frame Your Posters

Some people would tell you that keeping a vintage “Road House” poster hanging in your room is sad. These are people who cannot appreciate the genius of lines like “I used to f*** people like you in prison,” or the balletic grace of Patrick Swayze ripping out a douchebag’s voicebox with his clenched fist, and we pity them. But they are right about one thing: the days of Fun-Tak and actual tacks to secure your posters to walls with are over. It’s time to get some frames. Again, this does not have to be a professional frame job. This is a trip to Target after measuring a few posters to know what size you want, and dropping a hundred bucks or so on the proper frames, then spending a few minutes getting the posters in said frames.

Clean Out the Crap

Nobody escapes from their late teens and early twenties without a big pile of useless crap. Old textbooks, piles of T-shirts from events you attended that you didn’t care about at the time and don’t care about now, DVDs you got for a buck from a gas station, video games you haven’t played in years…all sorts of crap. And you never noticed until you got out of college, your parents congratulated you, and then made you take all the stuff you’d dumped at their house with you when you moved to your new apartment. So, bust out the shovel and toss this stuff. Seriously. You don’t need it. Curb it; that’s what trash pickup is for. And if you’re worried about wasting this stuff, don’t worry: we’re sure some starving artist will be wearing your Springfest ’07 shirt, talking about how he’s wearing it as a representation of capitalism’s flotsam and not because he hasn’t sold a painting ever, in no time.

Dan Seitz is the creative director at GammaSquad and the gadget guy at Guyism. He helps you act like an adult by being less of a jackass and not screwing up your proposal.

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