I’m sentimental about those old beach cottages. Often the owner has lived there for decades, and I imagine the decision to sell must be a hard one. Casa Del Sol is in a part of Hermosa that is zoned for up to three units on each lot, meaning you could build townhomes or condos*. When we submitted our offer on Casa Del Sol we stressed our plan to live in it as three generations of one family. No cold hearted developers us, we noted that we’d happily eschew the opportunity to build multiple units. We outlined all of this in our covering letter, a feature of the local real estate market that requires some explanation. You see, when you make an offer on a property here you write a covering letter extolling your virtues as a buyer – not just the terms of your offer, but what lovely people you are and what good care you’ll take of the home. We talked about the fact we loved the neighbourhood and had trick-or-treated along that block in recent years.   It turns out the seller cou...

Yup, this is the one. It ticks all the boxes. The boxes being a flat, sizeable lot, West of PCH, and a house we can live in comfortably while we figure out what we want to do. There are some bonus boxes being checked too. It’s on Loma Drive, one of my favourite streets in Hermosa. Right now when we walk to the beach we walk up and over a little hill – that hill is Loma. (Loma, I just learned, is Spanish for knoll. So this makes sense.) So we’re closer to the beach, on a street we walk down often. In fact we trick or treated along a stretch of Loma the past couple of years. It’s zoned for multiple units on each lot and there are a few ugly 90s developments but also a healthy proportion of older beach cottages. There are no overhead wires, which will make it an immediate upgrade for us. I’d be sold on the Loma Drive location alone. And this particular lot has a really nice feature: the path down to the baseball field runs down one side. So instead of a neighbour we have a magn...

We believe we're unlikely to outgrow our house and - notwithstanding a windfall that makes a walk street suddenly within our means - we'll be happy here for a very long time. I still got itchy feet a couple of years after we moved in. We’ve been keeping half an eye on the market ever since, just to see if something comes up that would be worth the upheaval of a move. Partly this is about future proofing. We'd like P's grandmama to move in with us, or at least spend long periods of time here, but have space for a little privacy. Which means a guest suite with a kitchen/dining/living area. And while I'm eyeing up real estate we can't quite afford, I might as well throw in a desire for a quieter street, one that's friendly for a child who's learning to ride a bike, say. I recently came across this wish list in an old notebook and it’s still a pretty accurate reflection of our wants and needs. None of these were priorities when we bought our ho...