A few weeks before Sam and I were married, we searched for a place to live. I had been bugging Sam for weeks to go apartment hunting. I remember it was April 19th, the last Saturday before finals, when Sam and I finally started looking for a place. After looking at two options, this is where we chose live. There were a few reasons why we chose to live in these apartments: it was the least expensive place ($330/month), it was only 3 blocks from campus, and it was furnished. Oh yeah, and the landlord was Sam's religion teacher at BYU-Idaho. If you can't tell from the pictures, we were super poor soon-to-be married college students. We had to save as much money as we could for our upcoming fall semester at Weber State.
These apartments were called Viking Villa Apartments. The apartments were located above the tiny store called Strapz Department Store Outlet. (Strapz sounded more like the name of a lingerie store to me). Anyway our apartement was on the backside of this building. It was a very old and interesting apartment to say the least. The picture on the top right shows the rickety old stairs up to our place. The other pictures show our front door (we were apartment #4) and two views our kitchen. The floor in the kitchen was carpet covered with lineolium (very strange). We had an old avacado colored fridge...that's right...no freezer. Our "dinette set" was an old table from the 70's and two plastic patio chairs. For one week, we couldn't use our kitchen sink. We hauled water from my cousin, Angela's apartment (a block away) just to wash our dishes. We took our showers over at Angela's apartment too. Sounds lovely, eh?!
This place gets better and better. Wanna hear about our bathroom (top left)?! When the toilet flushed, it would sound like it was going to suck you in! It gave my sister-in-law, Becky, quite the scare when she stopped by for a "quick" visit. (Sorry, Becky). The shower situation was just bizarre. When we moved in, there was a bear claw tub with no shower head or shower curtain. Above the bathtub, we noticed these PVC pipes hanging down from the ceiling by strings. We bought 3 shower curtains and hung them from the PVC pipes. Then we found the cheap-o plastic shower head that had a tube connecting the shower head to the tub's water spout. Taking a shower took forever! The water pressure couldn't be too high or else the shower head would pop off the tube and water would spray everywhere!!! I took more baths than showers because it was quicker. Oh, I couldn't stand that bathroom!
Now, it you are wondering what's in the top right picture, wonder no more. That was our view from the living room window. In the foreground, is the roof to the builing below. It was painted black. And if you look really hard in the background, you can see the BYU-Idaho campus. The middle picture is Sam with our ceiling fan. Since it was summer, it got really hot and stuffy in our palce. We didn't have any air conditioning, so this old ceiling fan was our only source of air flow. We spent many nights sleeping under the fan in the living room. One night, we woke up to the sound of something hitting our wall. When we turned on the light, we discovered that the molding holding the fan up in the ceiling was falling off, one piece after another. We dodged the pieces of molding as they flew around the room! I'm glad we didn't get hurt.
The bottom left picture is our living room. "Our" furniture was not sylish by any means. Our "couch" was an old fake brown leather, wooden wagon-wheeled armrested futon. We got creative with our storage. We stored what we didn't need into plastic Rubbermaid storage containers, covered them up with blankets, and then topped them off with books. Waaalaaa...instant bea-U-ti-ful bookshelf table thingy.
And now for our bedroom. We assummed that the bed would be a queen-sized bed, so we had already bought queen sized bed sheets. Wrong choice. Our bed was actually a king. We never returned those sheets. We just stretched them out and made do with what we had. Yup, we sure stretched our pennies as much as we could.
I remember my old college roommate, Ivy, came over to visit. I felt a little embarrassed about my old, beat up apartment and told Ivy all about it. I told her how frustrating the apartment was and how lucky my brother and sister-in-law were to have such a nice new apartment to live in right next to campus. Ivy said something like, "Yeah, I'd be jealous too. But guess what?! Years down the road, you'll look back on this apartment and laugh. You'll have so many fun stories to tell about your first place." Ivy was right. I'm glad that Sam and I shared that apartment together. We sure learned alot from living in that apartment. I'm glad I only had to put up with that place for 3 months.
