When you order breakfast in this country, you are often met with a barrage of questions.  Americans seem to take it in their stride but I, like most Brits I know, find it overwhelming. Choosing windows is a bit like that. There are so many more options than we had imagined. We thought we wanted steel framed windows, but it turns out they're beyond our budget. So we browsed aluminium and wood frames. We looked at ones with leading ('muntins' in American) and ones without. We considered windows you open with a crank and ones you open by pushing them out.  We reviewed retractable screens as well as the fixed kind. We weighed up sliding versus concertina french windows. And all of that was before we got onto how big they needed to be. In a way it was worse than the 'Choice Hellhole' of a breakfast order, because some of these window options were a dead-end. They'd never say 'oh if you want sausage then you have to have rye toast', would the...

But frankly in Hermosa Beach there aren't a lot of other options. So, call us foolish, but that's what we're building on. A prerequisite of the planning approvals is a soil survey. Not sure if it's for the Planning approval, the Building approval, the Coastal Commission approval, or some other body I haven't figured out yet. Either the structural or the civil engineer needs the soils survey for their work. Maybe they both do. I sniggered a bit at the idea of a soil survey because Hermosa is, as I said, entirely built on sand. I suggested I do it myself. But rules is rules and so we got our soil survey done by a proper soil surveying firm. Two men came out and spent hours boring holes and digging out dirt. A couple of weeks later we got a twelve page report which concluded that - yes - you've guessed it, this lot is all sand. Who'da thought it? It was also good to know that we are not building our house directly on a seismic fault, I guess...

We finally stopped tinkering with the floor plans, adding and subtracting stories, and dithering about roof decks. We consider these to be floor plans to be pretty much final. That is to say, they represent the house we want to build. My  previous post  shows how it will look from the outside. Here's where we landed on the floor plans (if you click the image will expand in a pop-up): Below ground Ground floor First floor (if you're British anyway) Roof And yes, I do still consider it a two story house despite the rooftop lounge and the wine room. I think we should probably celebrate. Getting to final floor plans is a major milestone: we've reached basecamp in the mountain of building a house. Or maybe we've just got our maps out and decided on a route. Either way, it's the end of a phase and a cheque has been written to the architect to prove it. Getting here only took us about a month longer than I thought it would, which isn't bad cons...