Happy Mothers day to everyone! Hope you got some gifts related to your gardens! I got spoiled with great stuff this year - my son gave me a nice tube of that too expensive to buy but wonderful as a gift (smile) Crabtree and Evelyn "Gardeners Hand Therapy". Hands are looking pretty rough, so it was very much appreciated! DDDDH came through with this sit upon garden scooter/cart that is really sturdy in cast metal with an adjustable seat like those old time tracters had - wide and it turns to accomadate all the "moves" I make when planting out. I do all my gardening from a sit on cart cause I have bad knees, so this replaces half broken plastic ones I have. This is a cadillac! Ok, so I'd torn the ad out of a catalog and left the page on my bulletin board (very subtle..)but if he's gonna buy something, might as well be something I want/need (or he get something silly I DON'T need, like earrings!) Shared M-day with my son's confirmation, so we had the whole family out for a BBQ - nice. Sun held all day and once everyone packed up (around 6pm), I still had some time in the garden! Taking a day off from work tomorrow to do some major planting out. Hope it warms up soon - everything planted out so far looks so tiny! Nancy

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Two of my 3 are coming Saturday to spend the night and fix lunch on Sunday. Then they will take families back home that afternoon to get ready for work and school the next day. The end of next week, youngest will fly in from the east coast to spend a couple of days before he and friend head off to Yosemite with elder son and DIL to camp for a week and celebrate their May birthdays. My favorite thing for sure, having the "kids" visit.

Here's a suggestion. It hinges on ditching the side porch. Right now your public rooms (kitchen, living) and your private rooms (bedrooms, bathrooms) are all jumbled up. It's better to have public all together on one side of a small home and private on the other. To achieve this, I drew your kiddo's room + the front bathroom as a master suite. I'm hopeful that closing up the existing doorway and opening a new one across from the vanity is an affordable project. Another bummer about your existing layout is the disconnect between your living spaces including your back yard. To remedy this, I put the kitchen where your master bedroom is. It would be so nice to have one larger, open living space that peeks to the backyard. It's hard to tell if it's feasible, but I thought that by closing off the master bedroom door you could create a closet for a stackable washer/dryer outside the bathroom. I'd enjoy working this out on graph paper if you have a chance to measure your rooms. Yours is one of my favorite kinds of . projects!