1st Apartment May 2003 - February 2005

We got married on May 17, 2003 and this is a picture of the first apartment we lived in together. It was located in the “hippy” part of Boise you’d say, most people refer to it as the Northend. Our building was build in like 1912. It was a three story building and we lived in the middle floor. The walls were paper thin, so you could hear everything! I believe we paid $425/month for a one-bedroom apartment. I’m guessing it was about 600 square feet. This place was so old that we didn’t even have a dishwasher! We were about 4 blocks from the state Capitol Building and downtown.

After a few months of living here, we were asked to by the apartment managers. I think there were about 20 apartments in it. For doing that job, we only had to bay $225/month. It was a lot of work though for $200 and the worst part was dealing with the Aulds (the owners).

My favorite part of living downtown was our walks. We would always go on walks and look at the old houses. The Northend of Boise is beautiful!!! Home prices were crazy though and we day dreamed of living here someday. When we first got married a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house in Meridian or Nampa would sell for about $85,000. A house the same size in the Northend would sell for $200,000.

We really loved our ward. Our ward was the oldest ward in Boise history. Ezra Taft Benson was actually once a Stake President of that ward. Our church was located up Hill road on the way to Bogus Basin (ski resort) at the bottom of Simplot Hill. Here’s a picture of Simplot Hill below. It’s huge!!!


In our ward we both started out as nursery leaders and we had a really hard time getting to know people. Natalie referred to our ward as the “Newly-wed and Nearly-dead” ward being that half of the ward was newly-wed like ourselves and the other half have lived in the ward their whole life and were “nearly-dead”. There wasn’t much in between. Luckily, I was called as the Ward Clerk and loved it and Natalie was called as the Relief Society Secretary, so we got to meet a lot more people. We made some great friendships in this ward, like Brandon and Aubri Johns, Brandon and Michelle Booth, Ricky and Tamara Southwick, Cory and Taryn Sanford, the Dunkley’s (who were in their 70’s or 80’s) to name a few.

I’ve always been interested in what cool cars my parents or grandparents drove when they were young, so I thought I’d add some of our cars we purchased. When I got home from my mission I bought a 1994 Jeep Wrangler from a buddy. It was awesome!!! It had a lift on it and a soft-top that I would always take off. It had a lot of problems, so I traded it in and bought a 2001 Nissan Sentra thinking it would be a good family car to have down the road. Natalie had a 1988 Toyota Celica. We sold that and for some reason we bought a 1981 Cadillac boat!!! It was awful, so we sold that and bought a 1987 Nissan Pulsar for like $500. It was a great car for the price, plus it was a T-top. Then we started going to a public auction in Eagle (Musick Auction) and bought a few cars there . We bought a 1997 Ford Explorer for $3750 and absolutely loved it. We also bought a 2000 VW Beetle Turbo, which was very fast, but had problems. I think we only kept that for about 6 months or so. We also bought a 1999 Ford Taurus for $1900 that I’m still driving today. It’s not the prettiest car, but has been a very reliable car…so far. Oh, we sold our 2001 Nissan Sentra to pay for our dentist bill (that’s a long story) and sold the Explorer to buy a 2005 Mitsubishi Gallant when I graduated college. We liked changing cars for some reason.


Now to jobs. As stated earlier, Natalie and I both worked at Picture Galleries when we met. I worked part-time and went to Boise State University (BSU) part-time. Natalie worked full-time. When we married we decided it wouldn’t be the best for both of us to be working at the same place, so Natalie took a job at Valley Property Management in Meridian. It was a small company who managed home-owners associations. I really enjoyed working at Picture Galleries. It was a factory that produced 300 pictures a day, so it was a little hectic sometimes. I started out building a certain type of frame, called a GX frame, but moved to shipping manager and was basically the assistant manager of the whole place (about 100 employees). I was able to travel to trade shows a few times a year, so I went to Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta and High Point, NC. Once Dillon was born, Natalie quit her job and I worked full time while going to school full-time. Before Dillon was born we decided we needed a job w/ benefits, so I applied at Citi in their Citi Cards division (call center) and was hired on at $9.50/hour. It was a pay cut, but it had benefits. Citi was a great company to work for and they paid for my school. The office in Boise had about 1,200 employees and we handled the Sears credit card accounts. I was always in the top 5% of sales while in Customer Service. Later I was promoted to the Credit Department. It was more money and I could do my homework. During my time in the Credit Department, which was about a year, I worked 3:30 pm to midnight. I think I started working at Picture Galleries in May of 2002 and started working at Citi in March of 2004. I worked at Citi until August of 2006 and took my first job out of college. I’ll talk about that later…