It’s been a busy week for Anita at the Taylor house. While Chris the contractor has been out working on another job most of the time, she has been IN and getting the final touches done to both the main house and the outbuilding or “shed” as we call it. It’s rather large for a shed. What’s she been doing?

Replacing windows! There were a couple of broken windows in the main house and shed, so Anita spent much time visiting the famous Floyd’s Glass of Taylor (which also does most of the glass in all our houses). She triumphantly announced that the one in the main house was installed and looks perfect. And she only paid $12 for all three windows. If only the “sunroom” didn’t block one of the dining room windows, that would be one pretty room. As it is, people can buy a curtain!

New carpeting! That’s the big one. Check out the photos at the end of the post! Wow do those floors look great, now that our friends at Home Depot came over and installed pretty darned nice neutral carpeting in the downstairs “Granny” bedroom and the entire upstairs, including what was once the ugliest large closet on earth. The rooms now look light and comfy, and contrast well with the hardwood in the rest of the house. It looks ready for someone to live there!

Lighting! Hooray, all the light fixtures got installed. Sparkle has arrived on the stairway. That doesn’t even look like it’s part of the same house! When the stairs are painted dark brown, that’s going to be one sharp set of stairs. Plus, all the other ceiling fixtures are in, nice, clean and shiny.

And as a bonus, Chris and team cut down the strange long posts in the front of the house and put really nice solar lights on top of the reasonably sized posts that remained. It will be a great entryway now.

Cleaning the Shed! After the triumph of the floor cleaning, Anita has continued on to windows. It’s almost done. There IS some leftover carpet from the main house, so she’s considering getting rid of the carpet in there and using the new stuff, but we’re not sure if that will work or not. She has two windows to replace still, but it’s pretty darned good now.

We got a question in the comments of the last blog post (thanks, Mary B.) on how Anita cleaned the floors in there. It’s because she found a great tool. Here’s her report:

To clean the world’s most disgusting floor, I used a Rubbermaid Flexscrubber (it looks like an iron, but instead of the steam button, the button on top extends the front of the scrubber and lets you access curves), Mr Clean, and in some spots, Soft Scrub. And elbow grease, of course! 40 years of dirt is just a bad memory with the right tools.

It’s ready for people to come look at it now, that’s for sure. We’re waiting for a slightly warmer day to install the rock facing on the front of the house. It also needs one of the peg boards in the kitchen replaced and the all-important stair painting, now that the carpet’s in.

Here are some more of Anita’s photos of her progress, which will be added to the virtual tour of the house. That will help get people in!