Jack Tame: The stress of hanging wall decals

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

The obvious question is why?

Why would you do it? Why put yourself through it?

No one was compelling us. No one had a gun to our heads. We weren’t competing for a million dollars on a reality TV show.

So why, two weeks before Christmas, with all of the stress and pressure of the silly season, in the midst of that heavy, humid, tropical Auckland heat, with Mava seven months pregnant, why would we decide that now was the time to put up wall stickers in our baby’s room?

To be accurate, I’m not sure if they were wall stickers or wall decals. I don’t really know the difference. All I know is they were two enormous trees —three metres high— that each came in multiple parts needing to be perfectly stuck to the wall. Different branches and shrubbery had to be placed together perfectly, lest one half of the tree sit lower than the other. One mistake, and your eye gets drawn immediately to the error: a tiny gap of wall in the seam where the pieces should connect, or a lump of bunched up sticker creased together, a permanent reminder of stress and incompetence.

My first experience with them was when I bought a four-metre-wide vinyl world map for my old apartment wall. The map was exquisite, but it required two giant sheets to be perfectly aligned. I nailed the first —level, with no creases or lines— but tilted the second sheet by just one or two degrees. When you’re sticking them to the wall, you start at the top, so by the time I’d worked my way down to the Tropic of Capricorn it was obvious I was in trouble. For years afterwards I stared at the wall, consumed by the overlap which cut out three quarters of the territory between Adelaide and Perth, and a crease which created an unexpected mountain range east of the Falkland Islands. Trust me when I say this: even if visitors don’t notice it, you notice it.

I know what you’re thinking. Wall stickers are tacky? Well, you’re certainly right in the literal sense of the word. Given they would be the predominant visual features in our baby’s room, Mava had decided it wasn’t the sort of thing you for which she wanted an el-cheapo job from Temu. And given she is two people at the moment, we figured I should be the one on the ladder.

Looking back at those few hours though, I think the fact the tree wall stickers were expensive only added to the pressure.

As I teetered on the step ladder:

“A little to the left!”

Hands out-stretched to the wall,

“A little to the right”

I felt beads of sweat run down the bridge of my nose.

“No, not like that! Smooth with the palm of your hand.”

I don’t know how hanging wall stickers compares to hanging wallpaper, but it was a team effort in the end. From the peeling of the stickers to the spirit-levelling, to rubbing out the creases and bubbles against the wall.

In the end though, the real measure of success isn’t the fact the trees look fantastic (although they do).

The real success is that somehow our relationship survived.

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