Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home by Matthew Batt Page A

did that there is rarely a product that is hands down the best for everyone, everywhere. But I can usually figure out what that means for me.
    Not so with the house. Not in Salt Lake anyway. Other cities might have services to help consumers, but in Salt Lake everybody gets the skinny at church. There are no other options. You can’t just pick up
Consumer Reports
to figure out what the best HVAC people are in your area. What you can tell is who advertises the most, who drives the most conspicuous vans, and who has the most of what they call “Big Sales Events” but appear to be their perpetual jacked-up-then-superficially-slashed prices. But you also quickly realize that no matter who you eventually contract to do the work or deliver the goods, there is a whole netherworld of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors that drive the pedophile-ready, ratty-but-anonymous white IRA vans with the tinted windows and stickers hailing long-dead stock-car martyrs.
    We soon find ourselves adrift in a shopping world where it is virtually impossible to tell what you are going to get from whom. But that doesn’t stop us from shopping around and making arbitrary decisions based not on research and analysis but rather on fatigue and heat exhaustion.
    We have a month left on our lease. We figure that will be plenty of time. Still waiting for the light to turn green, Jenae makes a partial list. All we need to do in a month is:
     
Pack
2.   Change locks
Replace some carpet
Tear up the rest
Replace meth-stained light fixtures
Replace cabinets
Replace sink (just the kitchen one—
the bathroom one is all right)
Replace appliances
Do
something
about the countertop
Replace furnace
Replace water heater
Tear down shed
Replace garage door
Dig out old “garden”
(stumps and dirt piled against garage door)
Replace windows
Replace kitchen floor
Sand the hardwoods
Worry about laundry room
Paint
and, of course,
    We have roughly thirty days to take care of that list before our lease is up. And shop for all of the above. And work full time. And we don’t even know what to do about lunch.
     
    I still can’t make out the tattoos on the guy on the motorcycle, so I nose an inch closer to the car in front of us. The guy keeps twisting his throttle, flexing and tensing his forearm. The minivan in front of him blocks his view and he seems eager to get around it.
    The light finally changes and they get the green arrow to turn left, and he twists his throttle and kicks his bike into gear while we wait for our own light to go straight. Everybody in the two turning lanes eases forward, and suddenly both lanes light up with brake lights and the guy on the bike nearly goes over his handlebars he stops so fast. He settles back down and it isn’t clear what’s going on because the drivers can see that they have the green arrow. And then I hear what I could swear is a doorbell, and Jenae says something, and I haven’t had any coffee yet and I just want to be out of the car so I can eat my freaking hamburger and zucchini fries and maybe a butterscotch shake and gird up and go to the goddamned Home Depot.
    And then I see it: the Trax light-rail train. The left-turning car is flying through the intersection without any apparent intent or ability to stop. “Oh my God,” Jenae says, and the minivan in front of the motorcycle keeps turning left downhill, kind of gunning it but not nearly fast enough—it’s turning—turning away from the train coming from uphill and to our right and the train is finally braking but that obviously isn’t going to work in time, sparks or not, and in a second nothing is going to matter at all. The train rings its cheery bell again but it’s far too late for anybody to do anything.
    Jenae throws her face into her hands as though we are the ones about to be hit.
     
    Two years ago, I saw an accident that involved a couple of fairly slow-moving cars. It was a head-on collision, but the turning car wasn’t even moving five miles an