Chapter 1584 - 1563: Green Meadow Wonderland

After the housing issue was resolved, Ah Dan remembered that she and Marcus Quinn hadn’t yet canceled their lease on the house in Fountain City. Marcus Quinn left for two days in the middle, went back to Fountain City, canceled the lease, and then packed and shipped everything to Anfield Village.

Thus, the two officially settled in Anfield Village.

Every day in Anfield Village, Ah Dan felt unusually happy. The mountains were beautiful, the waters were clear, and the local customs were simple and honest. Every day was self-sufficient, and the only worry was what to eat today and what to eat tomorrow.

Marcus Quinn was a person with strong execution ability. In just one week, he took out a complete set of farm machinery that had been idle in the warehouse for more than a decade and cultivated hundreds of acres of fields. Of these, there were paddy fields, dryland, and vegetable plots. Since it was the latter half of the year, they basically missed the planting season, so they planted mostly crops like wheat, cotton, and rapeseed. Marcus Quinn bought all the organic seeds from agricultural experts in the provincial city, most of which were imported from abroad. After sowing, he waited for the crops to mature over their cycles.

Ah Dan didn’t understand any of this. She wore a woven straw hat every day, dressed in white cotton and linen pants and tops with floral patterns, and excitedly followed Marcus Quinn to experience rural life. She wasn’t interested in the land cultivation but spent most of her time in the orchard drooling over the fruits on the mountains, or she would go fishing in the lake below the orchard.

After the land was cultivated, Marcus Quinn turned his attention to renovating the houses in the village. He took Ah Dan to see all the houses and asked her to suggest how to decorate and arrange the houses.

They bought fifteen houses: five standalone houses and the others were townhouses, all two-stories with stone wall bases, white walls, blue tiles, and steep eaves. Each one had a yard, some big and some small, since the previous owners had already moved away from Anfield Village, taking most things with them. What was left was old-fashioned furniture.

Although Ah Dan hadn’t studied these things, she was well-traveled and had a great sense of aesthetics. Because the houses in Anfield Village were old, they had an ancient charm. They were stone houses with lush green ivy climbing all over the walls, refreshing and cute. Basically, they didn’t need renovation except for the windows and bathrooms.

The old-style wooden carved windows were not large, and there were no floor-to-ceiling windows. So in the house renovations, the rooms facing the yard were generally made into main bedrooms, and the small wooden windows were changed into wooden floor-to-ceiling windows, allowing the afternoon sun to lazily shine into the room from the yard.

Opening the curtains revealed a beautiful small yard, and as for the second-floor rooms, they were generally not renovated, mostly kept as suites. The large rooms were used as bedrooms, and the small rooms were used as leisure spaces and tea rooms.

The kitchens were basically left as is, since some people liked to cook for themselves, so the kitchens were only repaired and decorated, not remodeled.

As for the bathrooms, they were all modified to a Japanese style, with each house having a wooden bathtub in the bathroom.

Modifying the windows required demolishing half a wall. It only took three days to replace the windows in 7 or 8 houses with wooden floor-to-ceiling windows. For those not suitable for renovation, earthen kang-style window seats were built in front of the original carved windows.

Three days later, when Ah Dan saw that the windows and bathrooms were basically renovated, she started to decorate the houses. She decided to decorate the houses according to her own taste, going for a homestay style. As for the flowers, plants, and fruit trees in the yard, she didn’t touch them at all, only had the wild grass in the yard cleared, and the soil loosened and landscaped. Since most walls were covered with lush climbing plants, it saved the effort of painting.

Inside the houses, all the cement floors were covered with wooden floorboards, and all the mottled walls were repainted white. On the basis of preserving the original architectural style, all the houses looked brand new.

Marcus Quinn found painters and decorators from nearby villages. In a week, all the houses in the village were repainted. For aesthetics, he even had the exterior walls of the homes of the remaining villagers painted.

The dozen or so remaining families, seeing that the grandson of old Mr. Qi had returned to make the village prosperous, had called their sons and daughters a few days ago. These people rushed back from other places, partly for the fun of seeing what big moves the grandson of old Mr. Qi was going to make and partly as an early return for a rest.

When they saw Marcus Quinn and Ah Dan busy with the renovations for a week, and all the houses freshly painted, even their own homes were painted for free, they were very happy. They also saw that the wooden flooring looked much better than the cement floor. The entire house, covered in this way, looked retro and beautiful, so they imitated them. They also laid wooden flooring throughout their own homes, choosing the same color and hiring the same craftsmen.