PSA: my mom and scheduling

[mrissa]

Anyone who needs to see my mom ever again will need to make arrangements through me, since she will apparently have to be scrubbing wallpaper goop off our back hallway from now until the end of eternity.

Lutheran eternity, too, so don't think you can slip in between the time other Protestant eternity ends and the time Lutheran eternity ends.

(My father-in-law, upon hearing Lutherans say the Lord's Prayer, decided that eternity must last longer for Lutherans than for other Protestants, because the Lutheran version of the very last bit is "forever and ever amen," as opposed to Calvinists etc. who say, "now and forever amen" or just plain "forever amen." We have no word as yet on how long eternity lasts for non-Protestants, although if the wall goop continues at this rate, we may well find out.)

Friends don't let friends wallpaper anything. Ever. Because wallpaper is evil evil evil. I theorized this before, but now I know.

Comments

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Wallpaper is evil, and your mom is heroic!

It's been a while, but I recall Episcopalians ending some prayers (not the Lord's, some other ones) with "forever and ever, world without end, amen." So they might even have more eternity...

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

When we took down wallpaper in our kitchen and hallway, we were left with loads of goop. We had a professional (our friend Thomas) skim coat and prime the wall. The product he used smelled terrible when it went on, but it took less than a day and we were left with a smooth surface to paint. You might want to look into that, instead of spending forever and ever gleaning off wallpaper goop.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was about to try to explain how small it is when I realized that my friends in the magical glowing box are sometimes also my friends outside the magical glowing box, and since it's you I can just say: it's only the small bit between the kitchen and the living room, with holes for the doors to the basement, the laundry room, and the main floor bathroom. So it didn't seem like it would require professional help. And still may not, if we're reasonably lucky.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

people who wallpaper ceilings are going straight to heck, i tell you. someone did that to my last house.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ceilings. Ceilings??? Ceilings! Ack!

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

Having witnessed someone wallpaper a ceiling, I can tell you with confidence that those people have been to heck and back already.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

My mum and my big sister wallpapered a ceiling, back in the '70s. They are tiny, and it was a Laura Ashley very small repeating pattern, and both these things are less-than-recommended when wallpapering ceilings. They did it by standing on a table and using brooms, apparently. How they managed to match up the pattern perfectly across the whole damn room, I have never figured out.

Nor, indeed, why they did it in the first place.

[evangoer.livejournal.com]

Also bad: popcorn ceilings. I don't know why in the 70s and 80s they thought it was a good idea to spray-coat your ceiling with congealed cancer, but there you have it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Even the ones that aren't congealed cancer are still evil evil evil. We have popcorn ceilings in this very room. Bleh. In the basement, where we got to choose the ceiling finish, we have flat ceilings, but so far de-popcorning has not been a priority (although our basement people know a guy who safely and allegedly tidily de-popcorns your whole house if you give him the right sum of money).

[pezwitch.livejournal.com]

Ooh, really? I would be interested in hearing about someone who can safely and tidily de-popcorn things. It's not really much on our horizon of things to do, but I idly wonder about it from time to time. The previous owners even popcorned over the crown molding. :(

[evangoer.livejournal.com]

If you think the popcorn is NOT the evil asbestos kind, then removing popcorn ceilings is pretty easy. Use a sponge to wet the popcorn with water. In 15-20 minutes, wet the same area again. Then just scrape the popcorn with a putty knife, it'll come right off.

If the popcorn has been painted over, the water trick won't work very well.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is several thousand dollars, but I can e-mail you the name if you like.

Popcorning over the crown molding is just wrong.

[pezwitch.livejournal.com]

All sorts of wrong indeed. I figured that was the price range, unfortunately. I'll send you an email so you can respond!

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

1) The effort required to get a ceiling smooth and clean enough to look decent with a flat finish is not inconsiderable, particularly in an older house. When my parents redid their 100-year-old house a couple years ago, they went with a textured ceiling (though less aggressively textured than old popcorn ceilings) it would hide imperfections.

2) Popcorn ceilings cut sound bouncing around. This is less important now that many people are tucking the kids away in their own wing of the McMansion, but in a mid-century home where your kid's bedroom is 10 feet away from the living room, less sound is a good thing.

3) If you don't know about the cancer risk, fire retardant finishes are a good thing. I'm guessing that if a fire broke out in a room with an asbestos ceiling, that would probably buy any people on the floor above a little more time to get out.

That being said, our kitchen has a popcorn ceiling, and it is dirty and got spattered with red paint when we painted the walls. I'm choosing to ignore it for now, but once my basement is done, I think I'm going to have to deal with it. I'll probably just spray it, though, and not try to remove it. My house is old enough that there might be asbestos up there.

[evangoer.livejournal.com]

- Nothing wrong with a little texture, artfully applied. But popcorn ceilings just look terrible.

- Speaking from experience, it is difficult to paint a popcorn ceiling. Spraying is probably your best bet. Once you do succeed in painting it, you are even more locked in -- it's now physically much more difficult to remove later on.

- Popcorn ceilings are grody. They were designed in a lab by Evil Home Decorating Physicists to be a perfectly designed surface for trapping dust, cobwebs, and other nastiness.

- My (aspiring) firefighter friends have told me that houses that comply with fire codes from the 80s are already very safe, with or without asbestos ceilings.

- Sound suppression: point taken! :)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Episcopalian hell is as long as Lutheran hell. This must be why the denominations are in...oh, whatever the word is for sharing priests and so on.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Lutherans do not have priests.

The term you're looking for is "full communion," and it's...well. E-mail me if you would like to talk about this further, because the document that brought the ELCA into full compliance with Episcopalian theology of ministry was--well, as I said, I would prefer e-mail. (I can also give you a Cliffs Notes version for Flavors of Lutheran In MN 2010, because I have hopes that you will find that useful very soon!)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Oh, good grief. It was presented to us as a mutual thing. I want to hear more, but, er...perhaps not while I'm freaking out about job interviews.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry! I didn't get this until after I'd already written you. I hope I haven't been distressing on e-mail.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Oh honey, you would have to work *very* hard to distress me, is how much I love you. It's the fact that are distressing, and I'm very sorry that my hierarchy made you unhappy. (Perhaps if the ECUSA's idiots cause a schism, the not-crazies can revisit the agreement. If I'm ever elected to a diocesan council....)

And thank you for saving me from a potential landmine. I would not wish to seem ill-bred to any Scandosotans with hiring power.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not your hierarchy's fault, my hierarchy's. Well. Not my hierarchy any more either.

If you're ever elected to a diocesan council, that will be awesome, and I will go around saying, "Well, my friend Anne the diocesan councilor says...."

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

The Presbyterians I grew up with said "forever and ever". Also "debts" instead of "trespasses".

Anyone who is willing to scrape wallpaper goop off a wall (I am SO not a wallpaper person) deserves all the Heavenly help she can get.

[genarti]

I grew up with "forever and ever" (and also "the kingdom and the power and the glory" and "trespasses") in the Episcopalian church. Every time I hear just "forever" in the Lord's prayer, I trip over my tongue a little bit. Where's the rest!

Given that Christmas services with my parents now involve the Congregationalist church, and I'm not much of a churchgoer on my own, that's true most times I hear the Lord's Prayer said out nowadays. It's funny how graven into your memory things like that get.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it gets important, too. One of my memories of my cousin Mary's Nanu's funeral is Mar and I clinging to each other at the graveside and quietly but fiercely whispering, "f'r-thine-is" and on when all the Catholics had already gone amen. Because it was important for her right then.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

In the movie "Master and Commander" there's a shot where the camera just happens to pan over Stephen Maturin's shut Catholic lips as everyone else is saying "for thine is the glory".

I grew up saying "forever and ever" in the Church in Wales (which is like C of E only disestablished in 1922) and didn't know other non-RC versions of anglophone Nicene Christianity didn't. Gosh. It's like filioque!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That moment made me flap my hands happily, because he was in the side of the shot, so it wasn't that they were going, "LOOK KIDS, A PAPIST," it was that they were doing even the peripheral things right.

From the comments I've received, I begin to wonder if my f-i-l is wrong and it's only Calvinists who have a foreshortened eternity.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

There May Be Reasons why I have been dragging my feet on repainting the bathroom and kitchen, she muttered darkly. Wallpaper, indeed, and also, forsooth.

I'm not sure what my excuse is for not repainting the hall, yet, though.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I grew up simple Church of England, and we always said "forever and ever." And I still do, on the rare occasions that the opportunity arises: but always with uncertainty now, because I never know what those around me are going to say or not say.

[asciikitty.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you know about this, but just in case you didn't: white vinegar and warm water (whatever ratio you want, but more vinegar than half and half is... strong smelling) disolves wallpaper paste faster than water alone. And warm water is nicer than cold, but that may just be because warm water is nicer than cold.

(When we moved into our current house, all the rooms upstairs had this awful 1980s plastic coated hotel-room wallpaper in pastel pink and blue, and there was no way we were living with it. Plastic coated means water proof. It was awful.)

[sraun]

We have a "god bottle" for our dogs. Now, dogs aren't like cats - they don't mind a little water. So, dog god bottles are about 10-25% vinegar.

It turned out that the god bottle solution worked wonderfully for getting rid of the wallpaper paste in the kitchen.

[sraun]

When I was growing up, the Methodists used forever and ever also. Sometime in the '80's, they put out a new hymnal - and stripped the "amen" off of practically every hymn. I don't know if they changed their standard version of the Lord's Prayer at that time.

But I grew up with forever and ever! (and trespasses).

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Then there's the Orthodox conclusion "Now and ever, and unto ages of ages, amen."

I love stripping wallpaper. Yes, I am sick.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Your mother is a hero of the revolution.*



*Which revolution? Why, the anti-wallpaper revolution. We're working on a flag. Maybe there should be t-shirts...

[ellarien]

I'm glad you're getting your house the way you want it. I spent enough of my childhood helping to strip wallpaper (so that it could be replaced by more wallpaper) that I can appreciate the effort involved.

For my father, paint was the evil thing. It ran down his arms and into his hair, and splattered and generally made a mess, not to mention showing childish fingerprints. Wallpaper was fun -- a puzzle and a challenge. If he could have wallpapered the doors he probably would have. I grew up in houses where every room had patterned wallpaper on every wall -- the same pattern for every wall in a given room, but a different pattern in every room. (A more common fashion in those days and that part of the world was textured paper with paint over it, and maybe a feature wall of pattern; British walls, at least in older houses, tend not to be in good enough shape to take plain paint.) When he was young and healthy, he and my mother spent just about every school holiday decorating, so that I can remember two or three different patterns for every room in the house we left when I was eleven. And yes, paper (not patterned, just lightly textured) on some of the ceilings, too. Plain painted walls still seem a bit un-homelike to me, though I've lived longer in this apartment (dingy off-white, about half of it straight on the masonry) than in any other single dwelling.

[carbonel]

When I moved into this house, both the main floor bedrooms had wallpaper, and I hated both wallpapers. The office I spent hours and hours spritzing with soapy water and scraping off again (lydy and ddb helped), and then Bob the painter used some sort of liquid to get the last of it off before he could paint. I don't know what sort of liquid it was, but he accidentally spritzed some of it across a portion of the ceiling, and the popcorn coating came right off. I suggested that he use it to remove all the popcorn coating, but he was strongly averse to that, and managed to replace the missing stuff seamlessly.

The bedroom, though -- that was hopeless. Behind the wallpaper was something else, and that something else was not going to come away, and it wasn't suitable for painting over. So I found a wallpaper that I liked a lot, and Pat WINOLJ and I wallpapered my bedroom. It makes me happy every time I look at it, because it's mostly teal with lots of color variations and interesting designs.

But I would have gone with paint if it had been feasible.

[volund.livejournal.com]

I was also raised Episcopalian.

I channeled the 13-year old me from the time of my confirmation (because it was not long after that that we stopped going to church regularly) to aid in remembering, and it was indeed "forever and ever."

On the rare occasion that I'm in a R.C. church (last time was a funeral in catelynn's family) I have to deliberately stop myself from continuing to what I think is the proper end of the prayer.

[volund.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and "trespasses" too.

[mycroftw.livejournal.com]

A (Canadian Lutheran) colleague of mine once wrote:
"We're Lutheran. We know which end of the Cathedral and the Bizarre we got."
ESR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar), for those who don't immediately recognize what he was riffing off.

And for points-on-a-plane, The United Church of Canada is "for ever and ever" as well. Trespasses by default, but debts are allowed (as are other translations, even outright paraphrases - there's an official one in our no-longer-newest "new hymnal").

On a side note, we sang our organist's Lord's Prayer last week. He's rewritten it in one place, because it bugged him for 25 years that there was no "Amen". So now the women sing it over the men's "for ever and ever", and before the reprise of the first line.