"Green and gold" in a little garden I have 

One of the somewhat dismaying things about moving is that I've put a good deal of money and work into a few little gardens at our current house. I'm not much of a gardener, and not any kind of garden designer, but I prefer perennials to lawn, so I've been digging up lawn for gardens -- along the privacy fence (the border garden), under a big tree (the shade garden), a narrow strip between the driveway and a chain-link fence (the fence garden and rock garden), and around the side porch (the porch garden). This photo is from the porch garden (I also put in a some bricks in groups of three to make an informal walk). I love this plant and am wondering if I can dig some up to take to the new house. I'm also wondering how many of my rocks I can take....

Today my husband Kevin met the house inspector at the new house and had a pretty interesting time following him around and asking questions. That sounds like it could have been annoying to the guy, but Kevin said he was really nice about it. He came up with a nice list of little things to be done, nothing major, but things that will help us negotiate down the price of the furniture that the current owners are looking to sell us. (Going from a 1352 square foot house to a 2900 means we suddenly seem to have next to no furniture.) The best news is what the owners thought was a 15-year-old roof (and looked to us to be in great shape) may well be no more than eight years old, in the inspector's opinion. That just leaves the windows as probably the first big project we'll have to take care of (in terms of general maintenance).

Anyway, tonight we took care of writing up our requests in terms of the inspection report. So we're one step closer to the closing.

We also had a moving estimate today, which came in very reasonable, and we'll probably go with these guys (whoever they were -- that's Kevin's department).