I totally feel you on the "white stuff" thing. I learned that lesson the hard way when I tried using gel toothpaste to patch a hole in my wall and it looked terrible after it dried. Your five year patch makes me feel a lot better about my own fix though, because mine has only been up for about two years and I was worried it might fall off. It's amazing how well plain old toothpaste works for little home repairs like that, I swear by it now for small nail holes and stuff. Glad I'm not the only one who found this trick works!

Man, my Tulsa buddy had that same thing happen to him at a Love's truck stop, some older lady swore he was a younger Ethan Hawke. He thought she was just being nice until she showed him a photo from Reality Bites. He looked it up that night and the side profile was almost identical, same chin and everything. He said what really sealed it for him was when he found the same exact hairline recession pattern in a late 90s Hawke photo. It is kind of wild how specific strangers can get with those comparisons.

I get where you're coming from, but I actually see it a little different. Customer feedback is good, but sometimes they don't know the whole picture about why wires look a certain way during a rough-in. I had a guy complain about a bundle that would normally get tucked behind a stud once drywall went up. You can drive yourself crazy trying to make every inch perfect when nobody will ever see it again. There's a difference between actually sloppy and just part of the process before trim out.

Three hundred bucks for a thermal camera and I still think it's mostly a gimmick for weekend warriors. You found one hot splice, good for you. How many times has it sat in your truck gathering dust while you could have used that money on materials or a better ladder? Tools like that create problems you didn't even know existed, making you look for ghosts in the walls. Next you'll be telling me a stud finder is a lifesaver, and we all know those things lie half the time.

Oh man, that totally makes sense when you put it that way! My buddy Dave had the exact same thing happen with his pepper starts last spring. He was bragging about those biodegradable pots being so green, then after a month his seedlings all looked sad and droopy. I remember he showed me the roots and they were all dry and tangled up in that pot material, couldn't break free at all. He switched to regular plastic trays and now his peppers are absolutely huge compared to last year. It's funny how something that sounds so eco-friendly on the package can actually be worse for the plants in practice. I think a lot of us got tricked by the marketing on those things.