Sugarhouse

"'You're married, you're getting older, and your parents are looking more and more like the grandparents they are pestering you to make them. It's getting embarrassing. Your pathetic renter's mailbox--the one with three former tenants' names crossed out--is stuffed with your friends' baby shower invitations. Just a few months ago, right after my grandmother died, five different people mentioned the word Ultrasound to me on the same day. It was both onomatopoetic and devastating.' In the cruel, cruel summer of a recent year, this was the condition in which Matt Batt and his young wife, Jenae, found themselves. Transient residents of higher-education-inspired locations like Columbus, OH, Madison, WI, Boston, MA, and eventually St. Paul, MN, they were, quite unexpectedly, living, working and renting in Salt Lake City, UT. And when a vicious series of deaths in their respective, immediate families set their anxious sights on some semblance of stability, they landed upon a flamboyantly dilapidated house in the Sugarhouse section of Salt Lake. With a shaky young marriage and a full-blown 1/4 life crisis on their hands, these perpetual grad-students/waiters/non-profiteers with no homesteading experience whatsoever, decided they would turn this yellow former crack house into a home. Dizzy with despair, doubt and the side effects of using the rough equivalent of napalm to detoxify their house, Matt and Jenae found themselves fighting for their marriage, alternately dodging and accepting the burdens and joys of becoming fully committed adults, while trying to figure out how the hell a rented power sander works" -- "The hard-earned story of a struggling and commitment-phobic young couple who, on the heels of a spectacularly difficult year, decide to catapult themselves into adulthood through the purchase of a dilapidated former crack house, which they manage to turn into a home, against all odds and with no experience"--