house | Bertram's Blog

And the Streak Continues!

October 17, 2019 — Pat Bertram

It’s so nice of WordPress to let me know how many days in a row I’ve been blogging so I don’t have to keep looking it up. Though, to be honest, being able to post a tally of my blog streak only matters on a day like today when I have nothing new to say. (With today’s post, the streak will be 24 days. Yay! Well, yay for me. You might not think it’s something to “yay” about.)

As for the work on my house: the two thick layers of concrete that comprised my garage floor are gone, and the poor neighbors are no longer being subjected to the sound of a jackhammer. We found a few more bones scattered beneath the garage, but nothing earthshaking.

The workers are at another job today, and oddly, I feel a bit lost without them here — the day seems so uneventful without holes being dug, fences being erected, concrete being broken up. But that uneventfulness is an illusion, a matter of all that energy not being expended around here.

I went to the historical museum this morning for a last meeting about the murder mystery, and in a little while, I will meet people at the monthly community dinner. So see? I’m keeping busy.

I am enjoying this last especially warm day of the season. 87 degrees! Next week it will be mostly in the sixties, cool enough to start planting all the bulbs I’ve ordered — so it will be me digging holes — three hundred of them! — creating (or destroying) my own energy.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in house, life. Tags: 23 day blogging streak, concrete, concrete floor, finding bones, last warm day of the season, postaday2019. 3 Comments »

Bone Deep

October 15, 2019 — Pat Bertram

As I’ve been updating my house, I’ve been updating this blog with all the weird (or potentially weird) things we’ve found, thinking these bits will eventually find themselves in a book.

First, there was The Dark Underbelly of Home Ownership, a post about my creepy basement, an all too trite scene for a murder mystery. Next, when the floor of the enclosed porch was taken up in preparation for putting in a new foundation, we found an old cistern that seemed to be perfect counterpart to the basement. Then, there was Something Nasty in the Wooden Shed, which turned out to be not that nasty, but it could have been.

About that same time, I found a bit of fabric in the dirt, but it wouldn’t give when I tried to pick it up. So I got out my shovel and dug. And dug. And dug. Finally, I got the thing out of the ground. It turned out to be a red-stained shirt. Although the stain wasn’t blood, and perhaps it wasn’t even a stain but part of the design of the shirt, it still seemed mysterious to me that someone would bury the shirt.

The oddities stopped for a while, though when the contractor was trying to figure out why the garage floor had a huge crack in it, he thumped on the floor and it sounded hollow. I had to laugh at myself and my reflexive “maybe someone is buried under there,” Because of course, it was just my brain delighting in the macabre.

Well today, finally, they came with a jackhammer to break up that old concrete floor.

Under the floor, they found another concrete floor.

And under that . . . bones. Just two of them, but still — bones!

This mystery seems to be writing itself, which is actually is a good thing since I am not writing anything at all.

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Posted in house, life. Tags: buried bones, concrete floor, cracked garage floor, finding creepy things in old houses, jackhammer, old cistern. 11 Comments »

A Dirty Little Tale

October 5, 2019 — Pat Bertram

I used to love wall-to-wall carpets. I grew up with wooden floors in the bedroom, and even with bedside rugs, oh, were those floors cold in the Colorado winter! As an adult, I always had carpets. Carpeting not only made the floors warmer, but seemed to give rooms a warm, welcoming feeling.

The first time I wondered about carpets was after the carpets in my dad’s house were cleaned before putting house on the market. The dark areas in doorways and at the base of sofas came clean, but then, though the carpet cleaner bragged about his expensive, top-of-the-line, sucks-everything-up machinery, it took only a few days before the dirt started rising to the surface.

Then, after moving into the room where I lived for a couple of years before moving back to Colorado, I really wondered. That room had a truly filthy carpet. It had supposedly been cleaned before I moved in, but walking on it made the soles of my feet turn black. After a few months of my complaints, the landlord had the carpet cleaned. It looked great for a day or two, then the dirt again became apparent. Finally, he hired a professional. And the same thing happened. Looked good for a couple of days, then they went back to looking as dirty as they had before cleaning. And that triple-cleaned carpet still turned my feet black, so even in the heat of the desert summer, I had to wear something on my feet while in my room.

This house I bought seven months ago doesn’t have carpets. At first, I worried about freezing my feet, but so far there hasn’t been a problem.

What is surprising is how dirty the floors get.

It’s been just a few days since I last cleaned, but this morning, I dusted, swept and dry mopped (turning the dust mop black with dirt), then I damp mopped with Murphy’s Oil and a dash of Old English lemon oil. And the damp mop turned black, too.

The dirt isn’t a problem. Although I live alone without pets, change the furnace filter, don’t wear shoes in the house, and have a sort of mud area to put on and take off shoes, this is an old, house, it’s a windy area, and dirt happens. Luckily, the floors are easy to clean.

What shocks me every time I clean, though, is what a difference a carpet would make. All that dirt I can easily clean up would get ground into a carpet, and from my experience, vacuuming and even steam cleaning does not remove any but the surface dirt. In addition to that, carpets emit fabric dust and can emit toxic fumes.

Yikes.

So now, suddenly, I have an entirely different view of carpets.

And — not so suddenly — I have developed a fondness for my very warm-looking (and clean!) antique hardwood floor.