Wallpaper dates back to colonial times, when people had much smaller brains. It would have died out years ago if not for the fact that women get pregnant. Pregnancy causes women to secrete a hormone that compels them to want to install wallpaper with jungle animals on it in the baby’s room. My wife and I installed jungle-animal wallpaper on a hot August day when she was about 17 months pregnant, and she was a driven woman. She was determined to make the head of the rhinoceros on one sheet of wallpaper line up with the rhinoceros body on the adjacent sheet. Proper rhinoceros alignment is very important to your child’s development. Children who grow up looking at rhinoceros heads springing out of, say, clown bodies, are likely to grow up to become drug addict ax murderers or members of the state legislature.
The easy way to wallpaper a room
Don’t be an idiot. There is no easy way to wallpaper a room. The finest scientific minds in the nation have been working on this problem for decades, and they have failed miserably.
Oh, sure, the salesman at the wallpaper store will tell you it’s easy to install wallpaper, but you’ll notice his store walls aren’t wallpapered. They’re painted Rodent Dropping White.
Paneling
Paneling is a surprisingly easy way to make any room less attractive. A panel is simply a four-by-eight-foot piece of compressed industrial waste that has been finished in such a way that it looks nothing whatsoever like wood, then given an absurd name such as Heritage Oak. If you were to show a typical piece of paneling to 100 people chosen at random, and ask them what it was, they would all answer, “I don’t know, but it’s not wood.”
Many homeowners panel their basements, because basement walls are usually cold, dank concrete with earthworms oozing through the cracks. The idea is that if you put paneling up, you’ll transform your basement into a warm, friendly recreation room where the family can play bumper pool and have several hours of meaningful family togetherness until the earthworms start oozing through the cracks between the panels.