RoomHop returns, delving into the depths of Columbia Housing for creative uses of the drab rooms we’ve been provided. Room and Lighting Enthusiast Meriam Raouf reports.

A flickering light fixture known as the “orb of doom” illuminates nearly every dreary dorm. This fixture emanates a gray light, causing vitamin D deficiency and widespread slumping in sophomores. So housing outlaws, Tim Weber and Andrew Sumner, took matters into their own hands.  Early arrivals for COÖP, the two SEAS sophomores remodeled the lighting in their small Nussbaum double during NSOP week.  It originally began as a joking space-saving idea. “So the idea came from having no idea where to put my floor lamp,” says Tim, “We’re in one of the smallest doubles on campus. And at the same time the lighting that comes with housing here is really quite awful. So when my roommate held the full lamp upside down jokingly, I was like, wait, we could actually do that.”

A few rewires later, half the original lamp hangs from the ceiling, operated by the light switch on the wall.

“We were a little worry about housing getting angry,” says Tim, “but it really shouldn’t be a big deal at the end of the year, it screws right out. We just left a small hole in the original plastic cover.”

But the lamp isn’t the only enlightened lighting choice. A string of Christmas lights and ornate paper lanterns hang by the window, next to the Internet meme, “troll face” prank, above Tim’s bed.

Behind the door, hangs a whiteboard littered with problem sets that would make Randall Munroe proud. On the desk to the left, hefty textbooks serve as bookends for the respectable assortment of cereals and Toy Story paraphernalia.

We have reason to believe that SEAS kids, can, in fact, read, as evidenced by the Harry Potter novels and sweet matching pillowcase.

Recently, the two roommates tested the lamp out with black light bulbs, which proved to be a replacement worthy of paying through the nose—I’m looking at you, University hardware. Now the lamp has party-mode capabilities worthy of florescent paint ragers and blacklight Nurf-gun fights. Only time will tell if the gods of housing will smile upon this black light innovation the same way we do.