Seven Homes in Eight Years

This summer John and I will celebrate our eighth anniversary and we will move into our seventh home. Considering we've been in our current home for 4 years you can guess we moved a lot in the first few years of marriage. I think every couple is supposed to have stories to tell about their first home. We are certainly no exception. I think our first home is the epitome of starving student housing.

It was affectionately named the Cheese House. I think it was a decent sized house when it was built but to make it more profitable to rent it was turned into 7 apartments. Truthfully we had one of the larger apartments in the house. Anywhere they could squeeze in another apartment they did. Our bedroom used to be the upstairs balcony. How could we tell? Well, the living room window that looked out onto our bedroom was the first clue. No joke. Look.

We also had a patio door with a window that led into our bedroom and lovely shower that you couldn't stand up straight in. But our pride and joy was our refrigerator. The Kelvinator. It helped keep us on budget and on a diet. That blue thing was our freezer. No, we never bought ice cream. There just wasn't room.

OK, truth be told we didn't love the kelvinator. If fact we noticed that one of the other apartments had a normal refrigerator and it was empty and unlocked. We decided that we would switch out the refrigerators in the morning when a friend could come over to help move it. I had some chicken that I had just bought that I put in the empty freezer because there was more room. Of course the next morning when we went to get the fridge we discovered that someone had moved in during the night. Well I couldn't let the chicken go to waste! I knocked on the door met the new neighbors and asked for our chicken back. What would you know, we became great friends. It was even more fun when we ran into them at Stake Conference a few years ago. It turns out we both moved to Arizona.

You can tell from the pictures that the decor was lovely as well. The first time our home teachers ever came over one of them remarked how he could see five different wallpaper patterns from where he sat. I think my brother put it best when he first saw the apartment. John was explaining how he was trying to discretely drill a hole in the bottom of the wall so that he could get the phone line into our bedroom. My brother just looked at him and said "Why don't you just string it through the window? I don't think it will really detract from the decor." We did. And it didn't. By the way, if you ever wanted to see our first home, you can't. It was demolished shortly after we moved out. Big surprise.

Really, it was a great place to start. After this, everyplace was better. Our third apartment we thought was really nice. It had two bedrooms! And it was the first place that could fit more than a loveseat in our living room! It was a little old but really well kept up. We really appreciated the place. I always got really annoyed by the newlyweds who would complain about what a dump the place was. I won't chronicle all of our homes as this post is getting really long, but I'm glad for all of our homes. Really the houses were just wood and brick, but the friendships and memories we've made are really what makes a house a home.