Before my husband and I bought a house together on Lake Hallie in 2010, we each owned a home in Eau Claire, one block apart. All of these years we’ve kept them as rentals. The end of May, Bruce’s tenants moved out after a decade.

We spent over two months preparing the house for new renters, a family from California. First step: get rid of 3,650 days’ worth of grime, a huge task for this clean freak. I bought my own black light and became a reluctant expert in cat urine removal from basement concrete. When I tried my new tool on our own toilet, Bruce teased, “A person like you should never own a light like that.”

Bruce’s West Grand Avenue house was a dream to him as a young man: fireplace, attached garage, fenced yard.

Any working-class kid might see these amenities as a measure of success. When Bruce and his last wife made an offer on it in 1991, he used to drive past and think this was the finest house he could ever buy.

They raised three children here. First steps and last holidays, blanket forts and banging screen doors, not to mention all those other commotions of the heart. After his divorce, Bruce stayed in the house. He tells me he compulsively bought toilet paper, as if running out of essentials meant he failed as a single parent. He added a backyard deck and a sliding door; he made the place his own.

Then I came around. His kids asked me to stand against the kitchen wall so I could be measured on the Taylor growth chart. This was a concrete way of welcoming me to their home if not into their lives: my name, height and the date were penciled onto the wall next to their records from various ages. Of course, they were also seeing how I’d measure up in other ways. Twelve years ago, that family relic was painted over by Bruce’s first tenants — unceremoniously, I’m sure.

This summer there were other unexpected finds.

Back in 2010, we pulled son Noah’s huge punching bag from his basement bedroom to the utility room and forgot about it. Recently two strong dudes dragged the base to a wash tub and lifted it just enough to empty out 20-year-old water. It took thirty minutes to drain.

Son Dan’s boxes of artwork were stored in the attic closet. Some he made for school projects, but most of his sketches he drew on scraps of paper which Bruce still treasures.

Daughter Laura carved her name onto the windowsill. I try to imagine the moment this good doobie hatched such a naughty idea. Bruce tells me as a girl she loved to dance with him in the kitchen. She’ll soon be dancing with a baby of her own.

The spring Laura was born, the attic was transformed into an office by Bruce’s friend David “Hippie” Wright. Her mom was on bedrest and Bruce was teaching full-time, caring for his 5- and 8-year-old boys, and helping a construction crew. Hippie guaranteed the workmanship for life. He died a few years later. This office — part man-cave, part writer’s den — was where Bruce escaped household chaos. Like many parents, he did not realize until much later: that relentless clatter from his children was really music.

Poet Jane Hirschfield writes, “A life is not a house; you don’t go through them as if they were doors to another.” But sometimes, it seems so. Every Saturday and Sunday from Memorial weekend until almost Labor Day, I scrubbed and polished, painted and stained at the place Bruce now calls simply “West Grand.” My long silent hours were a meditation, my work a labor of love.

Alone in the house, I recalled the rituals of my husband’s past life. The cupboard in which Bruce kept his Jack Daniels and how when I first knew him, I laughed that he put the bottle away after each pour. I remembered where his coffee maker was plugged in and where he sat at the kitchen table and how we’d lay in bed and watch the birch trees out his bedroom window. I was reminded how things keep sorting themselves out: this man, his kids, the house. All of it unbargained for.

So many people adored this house since it was built in 1937. The open staircase is made from what Tom Stuart, owner of Tommy’s Floors, calls “tigerwood” — a lesson in craftsmanship. In June, he refinished about 1,000 square feet of original maple flooring. You can still see the luster of this grand beauty after 85 years.

Two weeks into our West Grand preparations, COVID and then a bad back mean Bruce is mostly sidelined for the summer. A friend recommended Amanda Shiven. She and her all-female crew do everything — cleaning, painting and small repair jobs. When I couldn’t get the rusted toilet seat bolts to budge, Amanda and her co-worker wrenched on them with one tool apiece for half an hour. They employ that same tenacity in every job.

Her first invoice was handwritten on one of those advertise-by-mail real estate notepads, then photographed and sent to me via text. Just my style. She and her crew often work seven days a week for families and property owners. I couldn’t have finished West Grand without them.

When I showed the place to two 20-something potential renters, one guy gushed over a single feature. Was he wowed by the original millwork? No. Impressed by the many built-ins? Nope. He pointed toward an attachment on the office wall. “Cool pencil sharpener,” he said. “Does it come with the house?”

See is an award-winning author whose work has appeared in Brevity, Salon Magazine, The Wisconsin Academy Review, The Southwest Review, HipMama, Inside HigherEd and many other magazines, journals and anthologies. She wrote the blog “Our Long Goodbye: One Family’s Experiences with Alzheimer’s” which has been read in more than 100 countries, and she is a frequent contributor to “Wisconsin Life” on Wisconsin Public Radio. She lives in Lake Hallie with her husband, writer Bruce Taylor. Her essay collection, “Here on Lake Hallie: In Praise of Barflies, Fix-it Guys, and Other Folks in Our Hometown,” was published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2022.

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