Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home

"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 ¼ 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.

"A fixer-upper is just the thing to usher a young couple into adulthood, in this winsome memoir. Writing professor Batt and his wife, in the midst of the housing bubble, found their dream home — and when that deal fell through, settled for a Salt Lake City crack house that came complete with an eye-watering stench, tacky wood paneling, and hidden structural defects. The ensuing renovation gave the neophyte handyman an epic test of masculine resolve, a new appreciation for the aesthetics of slate flooring and poured-concrete countertops, and insight into the foundation of a successful marriage — namely, complete submission to female authority over decor. Meanwhile, Batt weathers upheavals among his extended relations — deaths, tensions, his cantankerous grandfather's embarrassing fling with a younger gold digger — that form an alternately antic and glum commentary on the ricketiness of the home-building enterprise. Batt's home-rehab picaresque is hilarious, engrossing, and stocked with a cast of squirrely tradesmen and manic realtors. At times the use of real estate as a metaphor for marital commitment is overdone, especially given the glibness with which he and his wife sell their castle. Still, his is a charming take on domesticity. Agent, Jim Rutman. (June 19)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Whether the focus is on the installation of a hand-cut slate floor tile or Grandpa's new floozy girlfriend, Batts retelling is fast-paced. Everyone has a crazy family, but who has a crazy family and a crack house to renovate into a first home at the same time? That takes guts or insanity, and the fun of this book in finding out how it all ends up. VERDICT His description of 'I don't belong here' aisles in Home Depot feels so familiar. While it's no how-to, this book makes it fun to follow Batts how-we-did-it, warts and all." Publishers Weekly

"It's hard to write funny, especially when your world is crumbling around you, but in this utterly compelling memoir, Matt Batt makes it look easy. This is a sweet and deeply memorable debut by a writer who's clearly the real thing." Library Journal

"Sugarhouse is hilarious. It's also sad. And uplifting. Ultimately it's a story about the most quotidian and most important thing any of us will do: make a home. Anyone who has ever argued over floor tile, loved a willful grandparent, or wondered what an orbital sander is, will enjoy this charming book." Andre Dubus III, author of Townie

"Matt Batt proves himself an oddball cousin to Thoreau and Tracy Kidder in Sugarhouse, a charming and compelling memoir in which a professor of writing decides to renovate a disaster of a house. Read the first two chapters, and you are likely to sign on eagerly for the rest of the telling, which shuttles easily back and forth from theory to practice, from humorous narrative to deepening meditation." Billy Collins, poet laureate of the United States, 2001-2003

This witty and affecting memoir relays the misadventures of a commitment-phobic couple who, on the heels of a heartbreaking year, try to catapult themselves into adulthood by purchasing a dilapidated former crack house and attempting to turn it into a home.

Matt Batt's work has appeared in Tin House and on The Huffington Post and elsewhere. The Missouri Review recently called him a "heavy hitter" of nonfiction, and he's been nominated six times for the Pushcart Prize and is the recipient of an individual Artist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  1

What Well Call Home 3

The Scene and the Scenery 9

Economy 20

The Cuts and Clarities of Diamonds 36

Chuck Norris Time 48

South of Bountifu 61

On Moving On 70

  2

Gathering Jacks 85

The Mandoor 94

This Little Knife of Mine 103

Fast Dancing 117

Lesser Acts of Transubstantiation 126

Remnants of an Ancient Sea 143

Getting Out of Sand Traps 160

In Defense of Dilettantes 175

Behind the Confectionary 187

Finish, Carpenter! 207

  3

Watershed 225

Homecoming 251

  Acknowledgments 255