Thank You

Thank you all so much for taking time out of your busy day to write to us and for all the kind words you all have left either by email or blog. Blogging is so challenging for me, since there are no instructions just trial and error and I must confess it has been mostly my error, Gary is always there to help me out since two heads are better then one. I do believe we are getting the hang of it.

Our First Entry ~Welcome to Our Home~

Our home is located in Modesto California. Modesto is best known for the movie "American Graffiti" directed by George Lucas. Our home has four bedrooms and two bathrooms, approximately 1.560 sq. The house had its own sense of charm from the builder, but we knew it could look even better and we wanted to bring out its hidden potential and make it our own style of Country Cottage and so the decorating began. We added the masonry work you see to the face of the house and on the sides of the garage, added the walk way up to the front door, re-designed the landscape, changed out the lighting fixtures and changed the color of the house. I love RED and so you will see many elements through our home in red, even the front door is red. I will tell you the story about the red door later.

The lovely Crape Myrtle was planted three years ago, this year it's really showing off it's blooms for all the Bees in Modesto!. Boy do these little stingers love this tree.

Did you see the bees buzzing around the blooms?.
These purple flowers have a garlic smell and are suppose to keep away the mosquito's. I haven't seen any pesky mosquito's flying around the tree just yucking snails hiding under the foliage.

Oh! Our flag flying high, so beautiful, we keep it high in support of our family and friends serving in our Military. Our nephew James Brenneis is on his second tour in Iraq and family friend May-Ree Neumeier also served in Iraq. Our family gives our support to all who have served and to all who are now serving our country. We support you and can't wait to have you all home again. In spite of the heat wave of 106 we were having, this flower box is doing very well, I think it was due to the new watering drip system Gary installed.

Front Porch
The front porch is where Gary loves to have his coffee on the weekends and watch all the neighbors walking their dogs and exercising, he is just content sitting on the wicker settee waving to all who pass by.

Beautiful roses!

New plantings, I hope these little guys fill in soon. I love this this old birdbath we have brought it with us every time we have moved, (we used to buy fixer uppers, live in them for a few years and sell, then do it over again). This is our last move since we will be retiring soon. We just love to fix up homes and decorate. Anyway, this old birdbath makes a great little planter only thing is the planting bowl is very shallow so little flowers do best.

Gary and I knew we wanted a Red door, but finding the right Red now that was a problem. I looked through many color swatches and could not find the right color. Then our wonderful painter Martin arrives and low and behold he is wearing a Red tee shirt, I said " thats the color Red I want". So he takes his tee shirt over to the paint store to have it color matched. As you can see in the picture below its a perfect match when the paint has dried.