Making a HOME away. from home 24 ~ Coming Home "Harding's my home, not that I don't feel close to my parents or anything. It's just that I've been living with my parents most of my life and now Harding is my home," said junior Ben Sanders. Ben is the owner of a bed ten feet tall, a life-size plaster owl , and a sign from the eighteenth century White Horse Tavern; and he has put it all in his Keller 3-A dorm room. By building additional features in his room and adding plants, posters and shelves, he is making a home away from home for himself . "It was the kind of thing that fell together really by itself, " he said . "A friend of mine that had a room just like mine had had carpet made for it and he was moving. He moved to a different kind of room and the carpet didn't fit. Well, I got in on the deal and got if from him for a really silly cost. Then I got to putting lots of things in my room. " The most unusual aspect of his room is his bed, which stands ten feet in the air. "I just need a lot of room and we didn't have it ," he explained . Having escalated his bed, Ben then used the area underneath as a small-scale den. Adding a chair he had made, book shelves and a flourescent light, Ben enjoys privacy in the area by closing if off with curtains. Ben said that it was not homesickness that caused him to fix up his room, but that he "couldn't stand to live in a boxy, sterile atmosphere ." He continued, "A lot of it is just that I'm a pack rat." Kevin Cave and Mark Hudson , who are roommates in American Heritage , have also experimented in dormitory interior decorating. Building frames seven feet high, they put their mattresses on top and their desks underneath - "kind of like a bunk bed without the bottom bunk, " Kevin explained. He said that they had copied the idea from someone else and that about half of the men on their wing had done the same. The only difference is in the styles: "Some of them are in an L shape and some of them are side-by-side, and the ladder goes up the middle between them. "
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