The foolish man built his house upon the sand

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.

Armed with this great news, our engineers can engineer away to their hearts content and we can tick off another box.