The Wood's Secret Garden

Our long awaited Open House happened yesterday!  The idea was for us to meet our new neighbors here at Mobile Country Club in Rancho Cordova.  One of the best things that happened?  We witnessed people who had been living here for quite sometime meet their neighbors for the very first time in our little house. The only thing that might have improved upon the day, would have been the weather.  It was HOT!  So, we were unable to leave the doors and windows open and the area where the refreshments were set up was outside on the patio, in order to allow for more people to move through the house comfortably. Even Betz stopped by on her way to the Jazz Festival:

Today is our 4th Wedding Anniversary.  It has become a tradition (if you can count 3 years as a tradition), to purchase a living plant for our garden.  Our best friend, Deni, started this when she gifted us a beautiful potted Hydrangea for our First Wedding Anniversary.  The following year we bought 2 more Hydrangea. Unfortunately, when we moved from our little apartment, we were unable to take our Hydrangea's with us.  Oh I suppose we could have; but,  they had become part of a garden that we started at the base of the stairs leading up to our apartment, and right before we moved, the management decided to build a garden wall to enhance what we had done, so we would have felt badly about digging up all the plants. Yesterday, we took a trip to the Garden Center with the intention of buying a large potted Hydrangea.  As we were going up and down the aisles, we came across one of the most beautiful plants I think I have ever seen. It is pictured above and is called a "

Although we are not yet finished with all the renovation projects, we have decided to host an "Open House" next Saturday - in order to meet all of our new neighbors. Heck, we may not be done for another year and didn't want to put off meeting people in our new community. The first step was to decide on how to invite everyone. I decided to create a photo collage invitation; save it as a jpg; and, have 4 X 6 photo prints printed at Walgreen's for 10 cents each. (We will be hand delivering these to all 500 and something homes in the park.) Phew - Not looking forward to that! I also really wanted to have something for all the guests who might pop in to meet us and tour our little home to take home with them, so step two was created little favors. I found little organza bags (meant for baby shower favors) at the Dollar Tree - (6 bags for a dollar) and filled them with: 1. A brief bio for both me and Michael with our contact information and our blog addresses tha

As the temperatures climb in this part of California, we were blessed to finally get our window AC installed today.  Keep in mind, the 50 year old window AC had to be replaced and it had been installed in the Jalousie window of our 1964 Mobile home.  So, step one was finding a new unit that would actually fit the space without having to do major modifications to the window.  Michael had taken measurements and researched the internet to find the only one that would have enough BTU's and still fit in the existing space.  We were pretty sure it would work and prayed that no modification would need to be made, like removing another pane from the window. By the time I got home from work our contractor and his son Ryan were already at work removing the old unit.  It was approximately 96 degrees outside and probably 85 inside our home. Dang!  I have a really big head!  Anyway--here is the space where the new window AC needed to go.  It took a couple hours to get it installed; but,

Well, we finally got the new fence.  When we moved in, we knew the back fence would need to be replaced.  It was leaning, rotten, and propped up with poles and boards in several locations.  The boys, (My husband Michael and our new neighbor Milan) had it up in just two days! I knew I wanted to carry the "Word" theme that we used inside the house, out into the garden and so instead of doing what I should have been doing on Saturday, I decided to paint a word!  You can read about it here: http://www.hometalk.com/3670854/you-gotta-have-faith To my delight, while working on the "word", I had a little visitor.  What is amazing is that in our tiny little yard, we have seen different creatures that we had never seen while living in the apartment which backed up to a huge wilderness area.  We have been visited by two lizards and today--a snake!  My husband ran into the house and got the camera and the little snake decided to hang around for a photo session.  Here he i