We moved out today. It’s finally time to tear the house down. But there will be no wrecking ball for Casa Del Sol. Actually you wouldn’t need a wrecking ball. You could probably just drive a golf cart very slowly into the house and it’d collapse. But that’s not the way it’s done here. Our house won’t be smashed up and dumped in a landfill. Instead, in accordance with California’s environmental laws, it will be carefully taken apart piece by piece, sorted and recycled.   I’m relieved about this. I was hoping to have some parts of the house salvaged, but it’s surprisingly hard to find a housing charity who will take this stuff without considerable investment and effort on our part. I want to do the right thing but not if it’s going to add a couple of weeks and a few thousand to our project plan. Appliances need to be fairly new and materials need to have been removed and cleaned. I asked our builder for recommendations because ‘I don’t want it all to end up in landfill’ to whi...

Seven days left in Casa Del Sol. Although as Ash points out we still don’t actually have our plans approved, all indicators are that it will happen very soon. And we can start the pre-demolition work in the meantime. So we are going to move out, take what we want to salvage, and let the builders move in. Then the asbestos is removed. A a fence, and a power pole and portaloo need to go up. A neighborhood meeting has to be scheduled. This will take three or four weeks, so we'll get the ball rolling while waiting for final approvals.   It's strange to be moving out of a house that will never be lived in again. No need to clean,  patch up paintwork or clear out unwanted old plant pots. It all just gets left.  Meanwhile Penelope is enjoying these last few days in the house very much: anything goes as far as art – or even just scrawling – on the walls, and not just in her bedroom either.  We’re ignoring the late summer termite invasion. I’m putting stuff down the waste dis...

Just as we were about to sign the lease on our rental, believing ourselves to be in the final stages of plans and loan approval, we hit a road-bump. The appraised value of the finished home came in way lower than we expected, because the appraiser quite literally could not compute the value of the Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) space. This is the mother-in-law suite, roughly 700 sq ft of living space, accessible only from an external door in keeping with Hermosa City code. The State of California wants as many ADUs as possible to be built. The Coastal Commission likes ADUs in areas where there’s a need for more housing, like Hermosa. And Hermosa Beach City is fully in favor too. But the slow pokes in the world of real estate appraisers acts as if they are a crazy fiction of an idea. The appraiser’s notes said ‘ADU is not usual so appraised at zero square foot’. i.e. ‘I’ve never seen one of these before so I’m going to act as if it does not exist.’ We appealed and got a higher valuation ...

Since we signed with our builder about a month ago, we've been going through the various stages of loan approval. In parallel, our plans have been going through the various stages of City planning approval. Both processes appear to be nearing completion. All we need is a nice juicy appraisal value to secure the big fat loan we want - and the final rubber stamp from the city. Both should come through in the next three or four weeks. I am itching to get started. Itching! I'm mentally moving in, deciding which pictures will go where, and even which drawer the spices will go in. I've drawn up detailed sketches of all our cabinetry, accompanied by fact-based estimates of the cubic footage and hanging space we'll need for all our storage. I've made a long list of native plants. I've found a nook for a desk on the floor plan that triggered a happy couple of hours sketching alternative window plans for that corner. One day I spent an hour putting all my various notes in...

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...