Apartmental physics

I doubt that Sir Isaac Newton was a renter. They kind of glossed over most of his personal life in high school physics class, so I can only guess at whether or not he came up with "what goes up must come down" in regard to pulling down your wallpaper when trying to get your security deposit back. (Somehow I think he wasn't.) But whether he intended his law that way or not, it's still true that when you're renting an apartment and want to get your money back, you're going to have to take down all the little improvements you made while you lived there. We've covered temporary wallpaper here on TAA before, and I even took you through the process of putting it up in my own home. But I recently came across two great articles about both the beginning and the end of having temporary wallpaper, and had to share! Over at Lifehacker, Melanie Pinola has put together a great post on installing fabric wallpaper -- with the added creative twist of using cutout fabric to create more designs than just the base "wallpaper." Her idea has got my own brain working -- wouldn't it be so cute to find a fabric with a cute pattern, and just cut it out around the pattern, installing it over another background fabric? Hmm... The possibilities are endless... ... And though the possibilities for cute temporary wallpaper are practically endless, the point of temporary wallpaper is that it can come to an end in the first place. Jordan Ferney at Oh Happy Day recently vacated her San Francisco home in order to move to Paris. (Where's my tiny violin?) She had Sherwin William's TemPaper installed in her hallway, and shared its removal with her readers. According to Jordan, removal was a quick and easy process, but her walls didn't escape unscathed. There was some glue residue left on the walls, and they'll probably need to be repainted to be restored to pristine condition. But hey, it's a lot better than what normal wallpaper (let alone paint) would have required to fix. This might actually be Newton's other law of renting: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. After all, the amount of damage your decorating does to your rental will certainly cause a proportionate heart attack in your landlord. Here's hoping that temporary wallpapers like the ones above only cause a slight murmur. Via Lifehacker and Oh Happy Day.