From Sardine Squeeze to Home by Degrees

The four of us squeezed back into three, small rooms on Vidas Avenue in South Salt Lake. This was to be our last apartment. We were saving to buy a house! We didn't own much so we left everything but the barest essentials packed and lived cooped up with our boxes stacked around us for most of a year, saving every penny we could for a down payment.  One might think that the ambience created by stacked boxes and the Sardine squeeze could have helped my home business a bit. As I had done in Ogden, I set up shop wherever I could in our cramped living space, to sew again on consignment and supplement our cash flow. I did make a lot of bridesmaid dresses even in cramped quarters but home-sewers--I use that word loosely--often brought their botched projects to me. "Can you fix it?" Some things could be fixed though this wasn't something I liked to do but when a customer stood there, yardage in one hand, a size 8 pattern in the other, I sometimes had to wonder, "Are they mixing up their shoe size with their dress size?" Sure, I knew how to fit a pattern, but even multi-sized Simplicity, McCall's, and Butterick had limits on how much larger a pre-determined-sized pattern could be made. And if it was a Vogue, forget altering that pattern, much. Can't say that customers found my skilled sewing any more worthy of the price it should have commanded in my new location than they had in my previous one. Most folks considered custom sewing a way to clothe themselves on the CHEAP. True, if a person sewed for themselves. Not true or fair to expect that of someone trained and capable of sewing a beautiful finished product for you. Still, those small earnings helped buy groceries.

We had purchased a simple Maytag washer--On/Off, Hot/Cold--soon after the arrival of our first child for $264. Our only other belongings were a child's twin bed, a baby's crib, and a Chevelle, the only close-to-new-car we ever owned. We'd inherited an old bed frame that had to be propped up on National Geographic magazines and "How to Adjust to Married Life" self-help books. When you sat down on one corner of the mattress, the opposite corner popped up, dumping you on the floor if you weren't prepared for it. The rest of our furniture was just as classy. We got someone's green couch, already used up and ready for the dump. It had no arms and the seat sank down permanently in places that had supported its most weighty occupants at some time. I thought I could make it look a little more presentable so I recovered it in cheap, sale material, a big, just plain awful, flower print but pinching pennies, I could not be choosy about fabric. Looking better? Not so much! Our table was an old weather-beaten wooden one that my father-in-law had used as a ladder to trim trees and shrubs or to paint his house. It really had an "Early Junkyard" finish--chipped paint revealing about a thousand previous coats and colors, a variety of paint spatters and splotches-- and raised nails sticking out or missing altogether. I just covered it with one of my lovely, trousseau linens I'd made, a beige, coarse-weaved fabric, fringed instead of hemmed. That bit of handy work even came with milk chocolate colored, same fabric-same fringed edge napkins. I was just doing the best I could and makin' do or makin' it up as I went along, then, but today, my "Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Or do without" decor might show up on Pinterest!

Days were filled with sewing deadlines, keeping track of the older sibling, and running interference for the younger one who, like her brother, was learning to walk early. About a month before our daughter's first birthday, we bought our first house on Bon View Drive for $26,950 at 8% with $2033 down and monthly payments of $211. We thought those were mighty steep payments. That left us with only $500 dollars in the bank. The house was sound but the carpets were threadbare and the drapes hung with slits along the folds, some places, tattered from sun rot. Our furniture fit right in! 

Wow! Three upstairs bedrooms? We splurged on a bed for ourselves, a Queen-size for $114.90. The ancient electric stove in the house still worked, though I was sure it must have fallen from a Pic and Pull truck that had hauled if off a Columbus ship before they set sail. Have you ever tried to "clean" the oven of such an old beast? I thought "Easy Off" was my friend but even duded up in long, rubber gloves, with all the windows and doors opened to ensure I'd come out of that project still breathing, the end result didn't support the sales pitch! There was a small--I'm talking small--refrigerator in the basement that the previous family had used for party drinks and snacks. It stayed in the basement. Do you know how many trips up and down those stairs I made in a day, making meals and getting milk for kids, as a result of that decision? There was unfinished utility space to plunk our washer down. In that same area, generous, floor to ceiling shelves would be used for food storage and jars of home-canned foods.

The basement had been divided in half, lengthwise, then professionally finished with cabinetry, closets, cupboards, counter and desk space at one end, while the other end was dedicated to a fireplace and wall-to-wall raised hearth for sitting, room for couches, a game table and in the center of the room, a regulation-sized pool table. The remaining space at the end of the house, on the other side of the utility room had been finished as a bedroom.

The back yard had garden space, two mature peach trees, an apple tree, clothes lines on a side yard. Just a car port and no garage meant a whole lot more snow to shovel, living there on the East bench, close to the mouths of Big and Little Cottonwood and Millcreek Canyons. Perhaps the view of Mt. Olympus through the almost full wall, living room window was the biggest plus. We were the only house on the street with a view, at that time.

As prized a possession as it was, one would think I would remember every detail about my reunion with my beloved piano and when it came from my mother's home to reside again with me. I don't. I feel sure, though, that it happened in this home. Otherwise, the living room remained empty of furniture for the years I lived in that house. The drapes and carpet were never replaced until the house went on the market, more than a year after I had said goodbye to Salt Lake City. I loved the formal, white fireplace in that room. Those were the days when I could sit comfortably on the floor, and then, get up again, on my own! I spent quite a bit of time in that room, free of decoration and distraction. There was always the wondrous view of the mountains. There was always a quiet, peacefulness about the room.