In the beginning....

Watching my newly married children setting up house has brought back memories of Randy and I as newlyweds 1973. Randy had just graduated from BYU in April of that year. We were married in Aug. and three weeks later he began teaching seminary to high school students for the LDS church in Bountiful, Utah. We rented a vintage 1930's house with a nice front porch about a 1/2 block from the school so he could walk to work. (Our early 60's gargantua Ford Galaxie was the only car we owned. We were a one car family until just before our 6th child was born 1986.) We were married coming off the hippie era of anti-materialism, make your own bread and granola philosophy. Plus, we weren't pulling down a flush salary. (I believe our grocery bill every week was $10.) So we made do and actually that was our preference anyway. Our furniture was acquired from the old barn behind Randy's grandparent's house in northern Utah. We hauled down an old couch-daybed type of affair. We scavenged for old barn wood and tree stumps out in the field behind the barn which we stained a walnut color and made an L-shaped bookcase-wall unit in our living room. I crocheted an orange and brown afghan for the couch/bed. I found old drapes from somewhere and dyed them brown.

In the adjoining dining room (with wood floors non-the-less!) we placed Randy's grandparents long since rejected wooden table and chairs set that we had also found in the barn. Together, we refinished it, staining it (you guessed it!) walnut as well. (Dark wood was really big in the 70's!) Our most creative decorating piece however was the area rug. I'm not sure where I got this idea but every few days I would go and scavenge carpet scraps from the trash bins behind carpet stores where the carpet layers had deposited the scraps from their days' labor. They were usually long strips from just a few inches wide to maybe 6 inches. I bought some kind of tile glue and a large piece of canvas from a $ discount table at the fabric store. I laid the canvas out on the floor and glued the carpet scraps to it in a psychedelic, striped pattern using the wider pieces to create a border around the edge. The result was quite the trippy rug! As the popular carpet colors were mainly bright at the time (lime greens, avacados, oranges, golds, bright reds) our dining room was razzmatazz. Our bedroom set was an old fashioned, somewhat dilapidated, dressing table and headboard Randy's mother had stored and she made us a jazzy purple- patterned tied quilt for a spread.

For Christmas that year we had to think of gifts that would cost us only a few pennies. We came up with paper mache piggy banks! Actually one was a piggy bank and the other was a mushroom bank. Rebecca and Brad had the dubious honor of receiving the gifts we stayed up all of Christmas Eve night to make. I'm sure they never held a penny! In fact they probably ended up in that barn we had hauled most of our furniture out of!

Those were great days! We spent many happy hours creating our new abode from whatever was free. I wouldn't trade it for all the Pottery Barn in the world. Granted I'm not lobbying to go back to that method (Randy probably wishes I would!) but it was a terrific way to start out married life.