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...

The week I spent trying to determine if we should sink our living room down a couple of feet, I really felt the limitations of paper floorplans and a ruler. At the same time we were debating tile versus polished concrete, and playing around with the room visualizers from some of the big tile suppliers. Nothing was quite like our house though. If only there was some way to really see how the house will look, in 3-D. That would make all these sorts of decisions so much easier. Our architects don't have a huge appetite to do this work and I suspect as a result it'd be expensive and slow. There is, of course, CAD software that just anyone can buy. And I have a computer, hands and eyes - how hard can it be? I downloaded an inexpensive, favourably reviewed kit, and soon found out. Four or five hours in I had a 3-D model of our ground floor. I put some tile down, added a couple of people and a cat, and felt very pleased with my work. The living and dining room looked about righ...

We have our Coastal Commission approval! Now all we need is a loan and building permits. And in the meantime we have this to content with: It's a detailed quote for every aspect of the construction. 158 quotes from subcontractors and suppliers. Each of which we need to review. Good job we don't want to go to the beach this weekend. Pandemic Memorial Day weekends are better spent away from crowds, poring over window schedules and the price of built in grills.

As we approach the final stage of planning approvals and building permits, it's almost too late to make changes to our plans. Almost, but not quite. Changes after this will require us to go back through the approvals process with revised structural plans, but we have time to squeeze in an alteration now if we are quick about it. If we're going to add a sunken living room, then, now is the time to do it. Are we going to add a sunken living room?  Should we add a sunken living room? I'd really like to. Flipping through pictures of houses, as I do whenever I get the chance, the single level 'great room' is starting to look a little flat. Maybe a drop in floor levels would add an interesting dimension, and provide a bit more separation between the zones. I pictured a couple of shallow steps, a total of a 1' drop between levels. This is the current layout: Kitchen, dining room, living room The neatest place to put in a couple of steps would be along the e...

While the world grinds to a halt, one might expect our rebuild plans to slow down a little too. We are waiting for two parallel bureaucratic processes to conclude, so that we can move into construction. Those processes are Coastal Commission approval and Hermosa Beach City Building Permits. All around us organizations adapt to deliver goods and services in a new, socially distant world. Upscale restaurants have pivoted to selling take-out and bulk bags of flour, the piano and gym classes moved online, and even the weekly spelling test is on Zoom. But I hadn't imagined the Coastal Commission or Hermosa Beach City Planning department to be quite so adaptable, to be honest. Based on correspondence to date, they seem less than dynamic. I pictured the bureaucrats working away in a large, dusty room with plans chests full of actual blue prints, and carbon copiers and fax machines clunking and whirring away. I stand corrected: the Coastal Commission has gone digital. Our application ...