More progress. We've signed a contract with our builder. It doesn't sound like much I know. But it is the culmination of months of 'shopping', weeks of discussions, and hours modeling different spending and borrowing scenarios. For a brief time the wine room was in jeopardy. As I had first suspected, it costs way more than $30k , once you allow for shoring on all four sides, an extra flight of stairs, then putting in drywall, flooring oh and shelves to put the wine bottles on. But our clever builder thought of a way to make it much bigger - creating an extra room in the basement for a couple of grand more. And without it, the appraised value of the home we are building would be lower. So, that's the sort of rollercoaster discussion we've been having. One minute we can't afford a wine room, the next we're not only building one, we're throwing in an extra room while we're at it. Now the wine room is back in the budget. We might try to save a l...

Those 3D models and renders were worth every penny. I commissioned them to help us decide on some materials - kitchen cabinet colors, how much pattern we want on our tiles - as well as to solve the great sunken living room debate . And they've been really helpful in that regard.   None of these are quite right but now we know we favor a darker cabinet, and a bolder tile. They've also helped in a very practical way, by allowing us to spot problems we might not have noticed till the house was framed. These window sill heights make perfect sense from outside, but inside the master bedroom they are just wrong, wrong, wrong. I don't think I could get a wink of sleep in a room like this. Much better to have spotted this now, before windows are ordered and the house is framed. I have them working on two more little jobs. One is to figure out how we use the space in the roof deck: How much furniture will we need? What cabinetry should we plan on building? How sho...

This little house has a wooden sign on its gable end, declaring 'Casa Del Sol' in looping blue cursive, hand cut from plywood. There was a big sun on the end of the house too, but that has gone. The name sign appears to have been there for some time, and I guess was installed when the owner painted some clogs blue and screwed them to the wall, and painted the fence blue and white. It's all quite nutty. Even nuttier, some might say, is my attempt to salvage the sign. As I've said before, there's not a lot that's worth saving in this house. We'll let Habitat for Humanity, or anyone who wants to, strip the house for parts, and we'll give away the plants. But there's really nothing we want to keep - except maybe this sign. Casa Del Sol is a (hyper-)local landmark, and the sign is redolent of old Hermosa and says something about the family who bought this house in the 1940s when it was brand new, and occupied it for 70 years. So I lobbied to someho...