Anyone who’s lived on their own knows that making interior decor decisions is never easy, so this story about a truly unenviable design situation is sure to make you cringe: This man can’t decide whether to leave his apartment walls blank or hang up the posters he’s had since his first dorm room in college.
Shit. This really is a bleak state of affairs.
When 33-year-old research scientist Will Horan finally nabbed his first “real” apartment in Chicago after finishing grad school, he was pumped to finally have a solid place to himself that he could decorate as he saw fit without having to work around moldy carpets and drunk, sloppy roommates. But after moving in, Will came to a punishing revelation: he would either have to leave the abundant wall space in his 1300-square-foot apartment completely empty, or hang up all the wrinkled posters of stuff he was into 15 years ago that his mom bought him at Spencer’s Gifts when he first moved out of his childhood home.
Initially, Will expected that he’d be able to drop around $500 on some cool prints, interesting antique-y objects, and maybe even an original piece from an up-and-coming artist to stylize his new digs, but he quickly realized he had grossly underestimated the cost of such accoutrements. He panicked as he discovered that a framed and matted art print runs hundreds of dollars, original art basically starts at a grand, and quirky garage sale antiques that actually look nice are not so easy to come by. After maxing out his credit cards on basic necessities like furniture and appliances, there was no way Will could cover any actual adult decorations. If he wanted anything on those walls, cracking open the beat-up cardboard box with “posters and stuff” written on it in marker that he’d lugged around to seven different apartments was his only option.
Will’s heart pounded in his throat as he imagined bringing a woman back to his apartment only to have her see a Pulp Fiction poster that’d absorbed a decade’s worth of weed smoke unceremoniously taped to the wall above his bed Clearly that was a horror he would like to avoid, but the alternative of leaving his apartment a sea of hundreds of square feet of unadorned textured drywall left him just as mortified.
With both possible paths leading to certain disaster, Will found himself in a situation no man should ever have to experience: trying to make a poster of MC Escher’s famous staircase drawing with multiple pinholes in the corners look more presentable by shoving it in an $8 plastic poster frame from Walmart. While the frame helped flatten out the wrinkles from all the water damage, it did nothing to conceal the grease spots from the poster putty that had soaked clean through to the front over the course of his college years. Making matters worse, the frame was about a half inch too big on all sides, leaving enough room for the poster to invariably become cockeyed no matter how hard Will tried to straighten it out by twisting and shaking it around.
Yep, we’re certainly happy we aren’t in Will’s shoes, because this is a living nightmare.
While both of Will’s options are absolutely terrible, he has to choose one of them. Leaving the walls blank may seem like the path of least resistance, but there’s no doubt that the beat-up cardboard box of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Fight Club posters under the stairs will be calling like a siren to a sailor as an easy solution to his awful bare walls. Normally, we’d be tempted to follow up to see what ends up happening, but in this case it seems like we’re better off just never finding out which route Will takes, because this isn’t going to have a pretty ending. Please keep him in your prayers.
