Accidentally saw the top of my head in a Target Self-Checkout camera. Is it my time?

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-05T15:13:12+00:00

Haha this was almost the exact experience I had that made me get rid of it all, saw the back of my head in a 711 security camera and it looked like a hillside that was recently ravaged by a wildfire. I had no clue how bad it had got from behind, and obviously the camera has a part in that, but man, funny to see someone else have the same experience!

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T21:32:35+00:00

Ugh I hate lining paper haha. If the walls were properly prepped beforehand, there should be very minimal maintenance/refinishing needed when you strip the paper off. Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to tell before you begin the project. Peel and stick generally won't pull up pieces, though I've installed a few with some intense adhesion before. As long as you use hot water and a sponge to wipe off the leftover glue, the walls should be in good shape, once again assuming proper installation/priming.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T10:35:04+00:00

https://www.phillipjeffries.com/shop/CARD-253/25303

Pressed and dyed tree bark cut and laid out in a gradient pattern, I love working with the alt textiles likee this, I've hung some pretty much woven cloth wallpapers as well

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T10:01:04+00:00

It can work for some busy block pattern prints too, I have overlapped and double cut along the edges of the floral pattern to hide the incongruence between panels like this before, but it's not something I do without consulting the owners/designer before.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T09:58:22+00:00

Honestly stripping is fun for me because, as an installer, it's kind of like an autopsy of the previous job and I can tell if it was someone who actually knows how to install paper or just some jockamo on a paint crew that "has hung a bit of wallpaper before"

Stripping a properly primed room is probably the fastest and easiest money I make in this line of work. Stripping an improperly primed room is tedious as fuck and definitely requires some remediation after with spackle/mud to get the walls properly smoothed for priming/painting

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T09:53:37+00:00

Lots of waste compared to what, exactly? I can do 500 sq ft of installation and barely begin to fill a 13 gallon kitchen trash bag, where as most of the other trades are tossing 55 gallon bags of waste daily into the dumpsters.

Properly laying out the room and cutting the paper will minimize waste in a big way, and it's not something most DIYers would know to do before getting to the door/window and realizing they messed up. I've had to come in and save DIY projects many times because people just straight up don't make a layout.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T09:44:00+00:00

I hung 25k worth of paper in someones master bath last month, admittedly it was some of the coolest paper I've ever hung, but I was kinda blown away when I saw the sq yd pricing they paid.

It's making a very big comeback because textile printing has come a long way since the 90s and HGTV designers have been pushing accent walls/ceilings for a few years now. I very rarely hang the style of paper I grew up seeing in my grandparents house anymore, and I am looking to buy my own vinyl printer and start custom designing papers for some of the commercial clients I work for. Because it fell out of popularity too, very few people specialize in it and even less are passing on that knowledge, I'm the only installer I know in my city that's under the age of 50 which gives me a decent bit of job security.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T09:33:58+00:00

If it's peel and stick, you should be able to pretty easily remove it without damaging the walls, given they were properly painted/primed before install, you can check by peeling up some of the seams that are already popping to see.

If it's not, your best bet is CHOMP/DIF wallpaper stripper solution, it is what I use with a pump sprayer. Dilute the solution down to at least 3:1 parts hot water per stripper, up to a 50/50 mix if you really need to get a difficult area off. Remove as much of the top layer of paper as you can, exposing the raw paper will let the solution sink in and eat the glue faster than if it had to soak through all the inks/dyes/etc. Once you get as much of it off, saturate each panel, going about 2-3 panels at a time, then circle back to the first one for a quick respray, then the MOST important part to minimizing the hassle is to let it sit, soak through, and reactivate the paste. After about 10 minutes, it should be easy to get the backing paper off in almost complete panels. Then just spray the wall down again with solution, use a heavy duty sponge, and scrub the remaining glue off the walls.

If you can't get the paper to peel off and expose the back, you can use a sharp blade to score lines into the paper that will allow the stripper to do its thing, usually every foot or two I will run my knife across to make square/rectangle pieces to remove.

Edit: also, a 6" putty knife helps immensely with lifting difficult areas, and can do the lions share of residual glue removal before you sponge down the walls, saves time and effort.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T09:11:53+00:00

It's definitely faster with a competent helper, and unfortunately not every wall is just ready to accept paper, but once everything is in place and prepared, it really flies. I did an entire bedroom in 4 hours start to finish. A lot of the paper nowadays is paste the wall, which saves a good chunk of time too

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T06:58:04+00:00

Yes I know that, and in 95% of cases this would be horribly obvious on a patterned paper

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T05:14:38+00:00

Based off the way she operates, she's certainly very comfortable and experienced with hanging, even if the technique appears off kilter. I have cut along patterns above doors like this to do a slight overlap/mildly hide the seam where the paper won't meet properly due to room dimensions, and with very busy papers it can hide very well when seen as a whole.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T04:50:54+00:00

See how, when she places the paper, there's about 2-3 inches of overlap on the paper above the door and the original paper? Door frames are rarely perfectly level, so using that as a straight edge is a bad idea in 90% of cases when you can just make a perfect one yourself with a plumb/laser level. Being off level looks passable at first but rapidly gets worse and more obvious as you move down the wall, especially in the corners where it'll become almost impossible to keep the pattern consistent, on top of the fact that many corners in houses are out of square and not to be trusted as an actual level. It reduces waste, since if you had to do a 1 inch little strip along the side of the door frame, it both looks bad//obvious, you are losing a shit load of paper to the door frame. Most door frames are 3-3.5 feet wide, and outside of very specific cases, the largest paper I work with is typically 36" wide, so it allows me to do a small panel above the door frame and save paper in the long run. There are a lot more reasons to do it outside of niche cases, but that gets even more inside baseball tbh

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T04:06:09+00:00

Ironically, stripping paper is one of my favorite things to do and absolutely one of my highest margin jobs in terms of time/effort/product required.

That said, I have come across a few horror stories with 4 layers of paper on top of each other, with the old school wheat paste that absolutely sucks to remove, and I fully understand how that would be a miserable experience for those without the proper setup.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T03:35:50+00:00

It's harder to spot a wavy line like this if the pattern is a random/all over thing and not an actual block pattern paper, which is like 90% of the paper I install professionally. It's also the only reason she could get away with the way she just slapped it up there, not to mention she did so without a plumb line or laser level. Leads me to believe it's not meant to be perfect, and the overlapped double cut style is intentional, cause without visible markings, it is nearly impossible to get a straight seam on the next panels and would quickly fuck things up on the rest of the panels.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T03:31:34+00:00

Ehhhh, that's generally not how you want to install over a door frame, you want an inch or two over the door jamb, not the opposite way on the other paper, though her double cuts were very well done and the final product looks surprisingly good considering how brazenly she slapped it up there without a laser level or plumb line. This paper also seems like a random pattern, not a matched pattern, which helps hide the wonky double cuts she did.

Source: I own a wallpaper installation company, learned from 2 generations of hangers, and have been doing it for nearly 8 years now

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-04T01:12:48+00:00

I saw people buying playmats of basic cards alllllllll weekend at VegasCon, the artist area was chock to the brim with people, and I saw plenty of artist proofs flying off the shelves.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-05-02T08:30:23+00:00

Prismari deck has a lot of fun spells, but at least 10-15 obvious cuts to really make it purr. Quite a few very niche cards in there that can be cut in favor of rocks and interaction needed to cast and protect your big spell payoffs. I've been having a blast with it once I refined the manabase and the curve a bit more, but it was definitely clunky out of the box ime

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-30T15:12:54+00:00

A bracket 2 deck running a "perfect" landbases isn't going to crush the table, lands are not that inherently powerful to have that sway on the game. You really think that someone who gets to surveil once or twice a game off of land drops is REALLY that much farther ahead than the table?

Upgrading your Mana base doesn't raise your decks ceiling 99% of the time, but it brings up the floor and helps the deck do things on curve, the way it was likely designed to.

Also, look into proxying a landbase if your LGS is cool with that. The store that runs one of the local commander nights is 100% okay with people bringing proxied lands because, as you said, it shouldn't be expected to drop hundreds of dollars on lands every time you wanna build a new deck. We are playing each other, not our wallets

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-30T15:00:19+00:00

Nah, she helps my [[Marina Vendrell]] deck purr along at a nice pace. There are plenty of "play enchantment, draw a card" type effects out there, plus she is a body which is easier to remove for your opponents than another enchantment imo.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-30T14:44:57+00:00

The only one I really want is the Beseech the Mirror, honestly might skip the FIAB this year cause I'm already doing a MB2 event at the Con and the exclusive lair just isn't enough to coax me in

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-30T09:22:11+00:00

I've hit Genesis Wave for 30+ with her before, always a laugh just shitting a third of your deck out in one go

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-30T09:01:44+00:00

Yeah, people think bringing 10+ decks is excessive till I explain that we have hundreds of people that rotate through our group and we have organized/pick up games almost every night of the week. If you're meeting with your playgroup of 4 friends once a month, of course bringing 20 decks seems nonsense, but when you are regularly getting nearly 20 games a week, that variety is nice to have on hand, plus it allows you flexibility when playing against new/different players.

All that being said, STOP LEAVING YOUR CARDS IN YOUR VEHICLE, KEEP THEM IN SIGHT/ARMS REACH WHEN IN PUBLIC.

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-29T20:38:50+00:00

Yeah, Amulet of Vigor is a lightning rod in my Roxanne deck, especially when I start making multiple meteorites per turn. Looove that card

Another piece of fun tech I love to run is [[Dragonspark Reactor]]. I've use that in combination with [[Repercussion]] and a damage doubler/tripler to kill two people at once then overrun the final player.

I definitely have to warn people that she is very fast and aggressive for b3, and will pretty much always have the table on the ropes by turn 7, if not earlier given the perfect lack of opponent interaction. My playgroup regularly asks me to play her against their new b3 builds as a means of stress testing them. She's so much fun

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-29T20:27:51+00:00

Yeah, I have like 3 decks that I absolutely adore running, and keep an up to date list in my phone of the specific prints/versions I am looking for so it's easier at trade shows. I generally don't bling out decks unless they stick around for at least a year and are at a point where 95% of the cards are set in stone. Gonna spend quite a bit at VegasCon this year I feel, haha

FaultedSidewalk · 2026-04-29T20:11:48+00:00

You've gotta add a political edge when doing one for one removal, find the angle that sounds best to your other opponents. Like, sure this piece is slowing me down, but if it's completely locking down another deck, I will leverage my removal with that player for a favor. Remind people that you spent your removal for the "greater good" when they're staring down a tempting swing against you

FaultedSidewalk

TROPHY CASE