Dorm Room Design and Construction | Hacker News Reader

Dorm Room Design and Construction

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90 pointswyclif32 comments

The room's pretty neat, but I'm having trouble understanding why a college student would put this much effort into something that needs to be torn down at the end of the year. I get the "because I can" hacker attitude, but as someone heading back to school tomorrow, I've got to say I would never put most of that stuff in my room. Hardwood flooring: who has the money to blow on that in college? It's one thing to optimize a room for comfort and utility. It's another to install unneeded gadgets.

I wouldn't assume he spent a lot of cash on the hardwood floor. Many of the main features-- like the Eames chairs-- were found or repurposed.

Plenty of MIT people stay in the same room for 2-4 years. (usually freshmen were in one room sometimes with a roommate, then if you made compromises you could get a single for years 2 to n (n = 4 or 5 I guess)

It really depends on the specific dorm. IIRC you could easily have the same room for 4 years there, more easily than some other dorms. It (and Random where I stayed) tend to have more of a culture of making changes to the rooms and building - like making murals.

I was in the same dorm room from my sophomore year onward. Unfortunately we were required to clear everything out during the summer months, including any similar customizations we had made, otherwise I might have gone all out like this too. It's a great way to make a small room feel like home. Looks very efficiently laid out as well.

From http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/images/DSC_0567.jpg, it looks as though all of the load is distributed between the single middle-rear post and the two ceiling drops.

I'm really surprised that was enough to support the weight of a person, possibly two.

Those 3/8" threaded steel rods have about a ton of tensile strength each.

My main concern would be the shear strength of the eye bolts used to connect to the threaded rod. I'd also put loctite on the nuts. God do those thing have a habit of wobbling loose on threaded rod.

my main concern would be drunkenly stumbling into one of those bolts sticking out. those need to be cut and rounded off.

on that rare but not impossible moment, will it support three people?

This is MIT - I'm surprised it ever needed to fit 2 :-).

That... doesn't really apply to EC. When I was a freshmen I thought of it as the "pot and people naked at parties" dorm. Which was actually pretty unfair, and there's a lot of variation between the floors there.

It seems this is the guy who also did the unauthorized security audit of the Boston subway system.

http://web.mit.edu/zacka/www/mbta.html

Yes. Good find!

That makes me jealous and angry.

Somebody just throwing away Eames chairs?

Were the threaded rods and other "scrap" metals "found" on campus?

Did you buy the flooring? What was the total cost in materials?

Oh god, put some tennis balls on those threaded rods sticking out from the bed.

Wow, if I had done anything like that, the housing authority would have found new and unique ways of kicking me out.

Really cool though.

They would if you tried anything like this in, say, Simmons. They're much more relaxed about student alterations to the older dorms like EC, though.

Restored Herman Miller Eames lounge chair for reading, having guests over, etc. It might be the Plycraft version, I can't really tell.

it's a plycraft replica. they are easy to spot because the chair base only has 4 legs, while a genuine eames lounge chair sold by herman miller or vitra will have 5 legs on the chair and 4 on the ottoman.

Actually, he mentions the base was taken from another chair.

I found two Herman Miller Eames chairs being thrown away. The bases were missing, so I pulled two chrome chair bases off some old desk chairs and mounted one of the Eames chairs onto a base.

It's definitely a Plycraft[1]; look at the armrests vs a real Eames[2].

[1] http://p2.la-img.com/21/21630/7445736_1_l.jpg

[2] http://the3125.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/eames-lounge-chai...

As awesome as that setup is, I can't imagine any college being okay with it. Holes in the wall? Glue? Custom flooring even. The amount of damage that all must have caused would give Resident Life an aneurism. Where I go, we have a $400 housing deposit each year that is only returned to us if we didn't cause damage to the room. And then we get fines on top of that if we did anything that would be costly to repair.

At the state school I went to they didn't even want us using push pins to hold up posters.

Very nice! I bet the room wasn't as expensive to put together as it looks. You can find small amounts of left over flooring & other materials on craigslist for cheap.

He didn't want any of the wooden planks showing through, but was happy to have 4" bolts sticking out at head-height.

What was the flooring before? Is there any way to temporarily lay hardwood over carpet?

He mentioned that the floor was a "diarrhea brown", which I took to mean linoleum or an otherwise hard floor.

While there is nothing to stop you from installing a floating hardwood floor (typical installation is floor > thin foam pad for insulation > click together flooring) on top of carpet, and in lieu of a foam pad, the end result would likely be that the floor would feel "mushy" when walked on.

Classic East Campus!

people like that always make me feel so humbled

It makes me try and mentally tally how many I played video games in college (and I wasn't even that big of a gamer).

Was it hard hooking up with chicks on a loft?

This is why I love MIT

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