“And a real plus,” the salesman said, “is that the buyer can choose the paint colors for all the walls, plus the flooring in the kitchen, bathrooms, and lower level. The bedrooms, living room, and dining room will be solid oak.”
I tried to stay cool—I loved to decorate. “How much?”
“Just $26,000.” (This was in 1966.)
“Too much money,” we said.
All that Saturday we looked at other homes in Oakbrook. We’d planned on driving up to Seattle for a special dinner after our house-shopping. By dusk, we were so tired we walked across the street to the nearest restaurant from our motel—The Lakewood Terrace. (It turned out to be a gift in disguise. The Terrace, as it’s called locally, turned out to be the best restaurant in the Tacoma/ Lakewood/University Place area.)
After church the next morning, we set out on our own. We found a couple of possible neighborhoods, called the phone numbers on the signs—they started at $10,000 more than the Oakbrook house we loved.
We tried a real estate agent in University Place. Prices were the same or more than the one on Emerald Drive we thought we couldn’t afford.
We agonized.
Steve quoted the regional manager’s house-buying advice: “Buy like you’ll live there forever. You’re on your way up, Steve. Don’t chintz.”
When we walked into the Oakbrook Real Estate office that Sunday afternoon at a quarter to five, our real estate guy was waiting for us.
If I could have moved my friend Laura next door, I would have called it heaven.
The afternoon we moved in, we had a visitor—Gus Krepela—complete with his wheelbarrow holding three azaleas he’d grown from seed.
“Just a little welcoming present,” Gus said. He proceeded to plant his prize-winning plants where they’d be the focal point of view from our kitchen.
“Come down and meet my wife Lynn when you get settled,” he said when he finished.
Gus, a big burly man who looked like a gardener with his rough clothes and dirt-under-the-nails hands was one of Steve’s agents. They lived just down the street on the end of Oakbrook Lane.
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
The first Monday, the doorbell rang. I opened the front door to find a smile and a plate of fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies. “I’m Janet Andrews,” said the lady I surmised was about my age. “I live just down the street. The yellow house with the red-brick trim. Some of the neighbor ladies are having a meeting this Thursday evening to start up a Junior Women’s Club,” my new neighbor said. “Would you like to join me?”
(That didn’t take much thinking. I’d just left Spokane in the middle of my second term as president of Tri Gama Junior Women’s Club.)
On Thursday, I got acquainted with Janet, Sandy Luttinen and Karen Fowler (who, with their husbands, made the core of the six-couple bridge group we’d start that fall), and a dozen other delightful women my age.
While Steve and I may have acclimated socially, and while we loved the neighborhood, all was not perfect in Paradise.
The day we moved in, I was in the main bathroom upstairs cleaning the tub (it was filled with debris and sawdust) when I heard Steve shouting. I could hear panic in his voice.
My God, I thought. Something terrible must have happened. I rushed out the bathroom. Tore down two flights of stairs.
As I made the turn, I heard two things: Steve shouting, “Turn it off!” And the sound of gushing water. We had a flood rushing from the ceiling of our downstairs bath.
“Are you running water in the upstairs bathtub?” Steve asked when I peeked in.
“Of course. We can’t use it the way it is. What’s that got to . . .
“Well get yourself back upstairs and turn it off! The plumber must have forgotten to hook up the drain!”
No one got baths that evening. Here we were in a brand new, three-bathroom house with no tub and only one shower that worked (the one in the flooded bathroom wasn’t finished).
Oakbrook Realty got a plumber out the next day. We never got a bill—for which I was glad—plumbers are always expensive, and they probably charged triple on Sunday.
FHA came to inspect a couple of weeks later and refused to close our loan.
“Your house isn’t finished,” they told us. “There’s no bullnose on the top of the stairs, no guardrail on the back stairway, the shower in the downstairs bath isn’t useable, and the ceiling has to be replaced.”
We’d never even met the man who built our house, so we contacted our real estate agent who said, “Well, we have a little problem. The builder had some money difficulties, and he’s nowhere to be found.”
Your problem, not ours, I thought. Steve agreed. We waited. And waited. Nothing.
Two months later, the manager of Oakbrook Realty arrived at our front door with a smile and a rental agreement—retroactive to our move-in date.
“You’ve been living here for two and a half months,” he said. “Free.”
“I really can’t help that,” Steve answered. “We were ready to sign the final papers on day one. The bank won’t sign off until FHA provides them a completion document. We gave our agent the list of what needs to be fixed months ago. Our lender won’t budge until everything’s done.
“I’m not going to sign a rental agreement, but I’ll be more than happy to sign the final loan papers when the bank gives us the okay.”
A week later the house was completely finished. Soon after, FHA inspected and approved.
We lucked out. With the money we saved on not paying a house payment for three months, we bought carpet for our living room, dining room, and master bedroom.
I was twenty-nine. Only days before I turned thirty.
I felt as if I were seventy-nine, almost eighty. Far past the age when I could do something worthwhile.
Two years before I’d been denied the opportunity to go to my tenth high school reunion—something I’d really anticipated. Steve had just lost his position at the company that went bankrupt, gotten a new job, and was in a month-long training program in California.
Thinking I couldn’t go without my husband, I pouted. During that period, I began thinking of what my high school biology/chemistry teacher, Mr. Nelson, had said.
“If you haven’t made it by the time you’re thirty, you’d better resign yourself to being a failure.”
