You are so lucky having that lake view and that mountain view and improved on that even with your beautiful plantings, congratulations! But living on a city lot, we can also improve, I only have a little pond and a lot of hostas, improving on that. Bernd

I've never seen bedbugs except for the pictures on the web. Kath, I hope you had no hitchhikers. You certainly took plenty of precautions, I bet you'll be fine. One of the conference rooms at work had been infested with them. The managers wisely selected a different room for meetings for about a month. The exterminators were in on the day they were first seen. Speaking of bugs, today, I am finishing up debugging the tropicals that spend summer outside in prep for bringing them in for winter. We are supposed to get into the thirties Friday and Saturday evening. I used to always use a systemic, but this year I am trying something that I saw on Facebook. I am submerging the pots and as much foliage as possible in soapy water for half an hour. I am wiping all parts that cannot be submerged with the same soapy water, then rinsing when I pull them out. In theory, this is a great idea, but I have been using more and more lightweight foam pots to save my back. Foam pots float :-) I've been settling for allowing them to float sort of sideways and rotating the pot so all areas are submerged at some point for 30 minutes. We'll see if this helps with fungus gnats. I only have the 4 biggest left to do today, I got 8 smaller pots yesterday.

What a spectacular house and setting! No, I wouldn’t paint the cedar shakes. The natural look is perfect with this color scheme.

Hard to order anything bulky that doesn’t get abused and arrive with some damage. Can you live with it? If not, I hope you didn’t destroy the packaging even more because you will be required to repackage it and send it back in most cases. Maybe you can get a slight discount for the damage? The problem with ordering anything is if you need to return it.