Anna's Blog

Have you ever fallen in love with a house from the pictures online and then go see it in person only to be hit by a horrendous smell? I cannot tell you how often this has happened to my clients. I have been in houses with a plethora of smells: mold, pets, and cigarette smoke… fun times.

Here are a few tips with one of those lovely smells… cat urine:

1. Enzyme cleaner from a janitorial supply

2. Big bag (20 pounds at least) of charcoal. Preferably not the kind treated with match-light chemicals. Pour that into an open container in the basement. (One you'll be able to scoop the charcoal out of later.) In a few days, the smell will absorb into the charcoal.

3. Odoban which you can get at Home Depot

4. Take out all carpet, clean with bleach, paint with "Kilz"

**you really have to get rid of the smell before you paint the floor though...otherwise you capture the smell permanently in the paint**

Happy Deodorizing!

Just the other day I was walking down State Street on my way to a meeting at the Overture Center and I thought about how much downtown Madison has changed since I moved here in 1991.

I arrived in my parents’ Volvo with all of my worldly possessions in the trunk and moved into a sublet apartment on East Johnson, just off of State Street. I was preparing for my junior year at UW as a music major and planned to spend the summer practicing my violin and hanging out downtown.

To this day, I love downtown in the summertime – not as many students and the lakes are glorious! The Union is still one of the jewels of Madison – right on Lake Mendota with sailboats galore and great live music, not to mention the brats and microbrews.

Head down State Street and you will see local coffee shops, great shopping, fantastic restaurants and a world class arts facility – Overture Center. If you haven’t been to a show there or stepped in to see the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, you must. Every Saturday we have one of the best farmer’s markets in the country. Then there’s the summer fairs that happen almost on a weekly basis: Art Fair on the Square, Maxwell Street Days, Taste of Madison…