One senior art education major has given an artist’s touch to the pad she shares with her female friends.

Rachel Aberle, a senior art education major, has prominently displayed some of her artwork around the house, including a set of six paintings of orchids.

“They are actually for sale,” Aberle said. “I need money.”

It didn’t cost Aberle and her roommates any money to create striking decorations on the house’s exterior either.

“[For the holidays,] we wrote ‘Gobble Gobble’ and ‘Let it snow, just not here’ on the window,” said Kim Brokhof, senior business management major.

Even without the writing on the window, innocent bystanders can’t help but notice the home’s eclectic energy. On the wall opposite the home’s large picture window, the girls mounted a light-up heart flanked by two life-size children’s puzzles, one of a little boy and one of Belle from “Beauty and the Beast.”

“This wall is really visible,” Aberle said. “So we wanted to put something weird up there. The lights are orange and red, so it looks really demonic.”

The living room features a working fireplace, three couches, two televisions, a telescope and a display of photos, posters and glamour shots.

“Me and Jill [Sanderson] stayed up all night making slipcovers for the sofas,” Aberle said. “They have been slowly failing us, but they looked really cool at first.”

More than just a learning tool, the girls actually turned the telescope into a Christmas tree by wrapping the stand in green paper.

“The idea was that [with the telescope] you could find your own star,” Aberle said. “We had all of our presents under it.”

The girls don’t use their fireplace out of caution, but they did manage to make their own fake one. Sitting in the corner of the room is the girls’ make-shift fireplace, which they created out of a broken television set.

“It doesn’t work, but it does make static,” Brokhof said. “We found it in a dumpster and painted the flames on it. When you turn it on it really does look like a real fire.”

This is the first year all of the girls have lived together and the house posed some interesting problem – the first being dividing up the bedrooms among roommates. Although the girls didn’t have any issues with squabbling over who gets which room, they did come across a problem when they discovered one of the “bedrooms” wasn’t up to code at all. One room featured leaky pipes and lacked something we all take for granted: a ceiling.

With the aid of a few posters and scattered chairs, the girls turned the craptastic room into a champagne room.

“It’s just a collection of all the odds and ends,” said Aberle. “Our landlord left us two rooms of garbage. We salvaged some of the lamps, though.”