TURN DORM ROOM FROM BARE TO BEAUTIFUL; IMAGINATION, LOTS OF FABRIC SPRUCE IT UP.

Byline: Jenifer Hanrahan Daily News Staff Writer

So, you're going to college.

Packing up Mom's minivan or the U-Haul with your prized possessions: a microwave to heat up ramen noodles and photos of the prom and the family dog.

At universities across America, budding scholars are doing their best to make their dorm rooms feel like home.

For football players Jon Ferguson and Rafael Lazcano, sophomores at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, that homey feeling is achieved with posters. Lots of 'em. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Belushi and scantily clad pinups.

``Dorm rooms can get claustrophobic sometimes, but when you get all your stuff in here, it's like home,'' Ferguson said.

Down the hall, Marianne Moll and Audrey Sortland, 17-year-old freshmen, unpacked CDs and socks from colorful plastic crates. They stood up cardboard boxes as night stands.

Sophomore Chuggy Feller's room featured nonoperable his-and-hers toilets he calls ``John'' and ``Lu.'' They're his idea of fashionable furniture.

It's enough to make an interior decorator shudder.

Dorm rooms aren't necessarily destined to be repositories of nothing but high school mementos and college clutter, say Bettie Ratner and Evert Meza, home decorators from Calico Corners in Northridge.

With a few hundred yards of fabric, a few accessories and a creative flair, dorm rooms can be stylish and comfortable homes for nine months.

The decorating duo spent a couple of hours last week performing a dorm-room makeover, transforming a box with bare walls and mismatched furniture into a dorm sweet dorm.

As planned, they kept in mind a couple of cardinal rules for dorm rooms.

``We wanted to make it comfortable, easy to maintain, without a lot of fluff,'' Meza said.

That, plus the room needed good lighting for studying, and the colors should have a soothing effect - to promote studying.

Aside from making everything conducive to studying, they wanted to design a room that a student could afford.

They chose a combination of fabrics for pillows, slipcovers and bedspreads in blue and yellow prints - a popular combination - to appeal to either young men or women.

Rush week

Day 1: In Mount Clef Residence Hall, moving in was in full swing. Students unloaded car trunks and suitcases and attended to their first order of business: hooking up their stereos and placing the speakers in the hallways so everyone could hear music from the Sneaker Pimps and Pink Floyd.

Ratner and Meza confronted Room 403, 12 by 17 feet, furnished with two twin beds, two brown desks with a faux-wood veneer, two rectangular dressers with four drawers each, a blue indoor/outdoor rug and a window with blue blinds.

The room has been home to a different set of students almost every year since 1961. According to the name tags on the door, it's soon to be the residence of freshmen Jessie and Johanna.

Ratner and Meza took measurements and photos. Clearly, they had their work cut out for them.

Day 2: In their Northridge store, the decorators brainstormed and sewed. Blue and yellow soothe the mind, they say, so they made coverlets for the beds using indigo denim fabric and pillows in a variety of prints and shades of yellow and blue, such as daffodil, butter and periwinkle.

``You want to mix your stripes and checks and plaids,'' Meza said. ``If you use all the same pattern, the room will look uninteresting to the eye.''

In place of a headboard, they hung a yellow and blue panel of fabric from a curtain rod they installed above the bed with a battery-powered drill.

Students who can't sew should consider buying a few yards of fabric and using ``fusing webbing'' in place of thread. The webbing melts when ironed to create hems or a loop of fabric for inserting a curtain rod.

The fabrics cost from $14.99 to $20.99 per yard at Calico Corners.

Day 3: They arrived in the morning with a trunk full of accessories from the campus bookstore and Pier 1 Imports (all stores offer a 15 percent student discount with an ID until Oct. 4) and set to work.

On the floor, Ratner and Meza laid a cotton rug in off-white, blue, green and butterscotch yellow ($100 at Pier 1).

``The rug pulls the light into the room,'' Ratner said. ``Otherwise it would look very dark and blue.''

Students on a tighter budget can purchase carpet remnants that coordinate with their bedding.

Since students might not remember to water their plants, Ratner and Meza used silk ivy in terra-cotta pots to add ``warmth'' to the room.

To maximize space and reduce clutter, they used an assortment of wicker baskets, letter holders, decorative boxes and paper trays.

To make the desks look less old-school and more homey, they covered the worn cork on the desks' hutches with fabric and added soft-light wrought-iron desk lamps ($32 each at Pier 1 Imports) with a beige paper shade.

On the walls, they hung photos in black ``distressed-wood'' frames and added a print of Vincent Van Gogh's ``Starry Night'' ($150 a Pier 1 Imports) in a gilded frame that ``pulls it all together,'' Ratner said.

The dorm room makeover cost a total of $1,223.94 - about $335 of that spent on fabric.

But the look can be achieved for much less. Most of the items - a teddy bear, the posters and picture frames - are things many students already own. And many of the knickknacks can be found at bargain-basement prices at secondhand stores, thrift shops and garage sales. Calico Corners also sells a line of fabrics with minor imperfections that costs less than $10 a yard; look for similar good buys at other fabric outlets.

Smart shopping will make for comfortable and affordable living quarters, with money to spare for college essentials such as books - and late-night pizza.

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5 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) DORM SWEET DORM

How to turn a drab, lifeless room into a home away from home

(2--3--Color) A California Lutheran University dorm room, above, before Bettie Ratner and Evert Meza of Calico Corners got hold of it and spent $1,223.94 on a cheery, color-coordinated makeover intended to make it into a copasetic study environment, below.

(4) A new mirror, eucalyptus branches in vases, candles and decorative bottles brighten up the dresser.

(5) Home decorators Bettie Ratner and Evert Meza of Calico Corners and the Cal Lutheran dorm room they transformed.

Tina Gerson/Daily News