Gosh, building a house takes a long time. Even longer if you decide to include a basement. Seven months after we moved out of Casa Del Sol, and five months after we tore it down, we are now the proud owners of a large hole in the sand. What took so long? Three months of that was spent waiting for the permit . So we didn't really get started till the middle of February. Digging out all that sand to create retaining walls - to hold everything together while we complete the basement and pour the foundation - took a couple of weeks. The walls of the basement were done by early March. Since then it's mainly been prep for the pouring of the foundation, with drainage and power lines being put in.  Meanwhile down in the bottom of the basement the concrete floor was poured and polished. This will be the floor of the wine room and the den. If we like the concrete, we'll do it exactly the same on the ground floor - where the foundation will make up the floor of the living/ dining room...

I literally couldn't sleep this week for mithering about our entryway closet. Entryway storage is very important to me.  I don't want to greet guests with a mountain of shoes.  I really want all the front door crap - sunscreen, sunglasses, bags, car keys, masks (will there still be masks? better make provision just in case), hand sanitizer (ditto), hoodies - to be hidden away. Originally the architect suggested a closet by the door to the garage, from the kitchen. But we walk out more often than we drive. So we had him rethink and put the closet by the front door along with a new door to the garage. The closet and the office door were side-by-side. They were at the edge of the library but I had plans for a gorgeous slatted back for my shoe-cubby-bench, which would screen it off.  Like this only with slats to the ceiling: Then we decided to put an internal window between the office and the entryway, so we could steal a little light. Our architect suggested we put...

Don't you just love those cement tiles that have been everywhere these past couple of years? I do. I think I've always loved them. I remember seeing the Ilse Crawford installed tile floor at High Road House when it opened in 2006, and finding it utterly delightful.  2006! That's forever ago. So that makes them timeless, right? Delightful though that High Road House floor was, those forest colours would feel a little murky for sunny Hermosa Beach. And we're not building a Spanish Revival house so we'll avoid anything too Spanifornia (though in a different house I would be 100% all in on that Malibu Potteries vibe ). We have a lot of stuff so that funky patchwork effect might be more visual clutter than we can absorb. I love it, but it's not quite right for our house. We're building a contemporary, black and white and grey house. So the way to instal the cement tile I truly have always loved would be a more contemporary, black/white/grey look. Something li...

There's been a lot of activity on the site the past couple of weeks. A digger and a sort of bulldozer-y thing and a lot of men have been moving sand around all day long. For a while it looked like a lot of activity with no real purpose. This is how it looked after a week. I mean I'm sure they had a good time but what did it really accomplish? Apparently it was a vital stage of preparation because we then started seeing some visible progress. They started making trenches, and sliding 22ft steel beams in, and pouring concrete around them. That's the shoring, that will hold our foundations stable while they, um, set. I'm a bit sketchy on the details. And now, we are the proud owners of a nice neat sandy basement. Next comes the foundation. I'm a bit confused about where that will go. If it goes in this hole then where will our wine cellar go? Watch this space.

 We finally demolished the house in mid November, after a few annoying but fairly minor delays.  It was quite thrilling to see that flimsy little shack torn down. Here's one of the last walls coming down. Here's Penelope knocking on our old front door. And the digger, left on site in anticipation of starting work within a week or two.  No such luck. We are still waiting for our plans to be formally approved. In mid December the City engineer confirmed on email that the plans are okay, following a series of queries and comments. That whole process had been pretty painful, with a new query appearing to arise every time an earlier one was resolved. But eventually we got there and now it's just a matter of paperwork. Literally, rubber stamps. Hard copies, wet signatures, various notarized and recorded covenants and agreements, and a stack of 'c-sheets' (technical, structural plans) going from one desk to the other in City Hall to be stamped. In the past the City allowe...

While the site is rubble and sand, I'm dreaming of a time in the future when I'll be sitting right here with a nice cup of coffee and the newspaper enjoying the scent of my flowering vines. Or harvesting peas and chard. Or hosting a social brunch, or watching Ash grill up a storm. Or planting milkweed and crossing my fingers for monarchs. This vision comes to me courtesy of Fiona, one of my dearest and oldest friends, who normally gets to design much larger and damper gardens in the Home Counties. She might not know California succulents as well as the local garden designers but she knows me better than anyone I could hire here.   Her task is to provide me somewhere pretty to do those things I mentioned. A place to sit and read the paper, eat a meal with family and friends, and grow a few easy crops. We also want scented climbers - because our perimeter wall faces onto a dogshit strewn path  delightful walkway down to the baseball field we are building it high. We want t...

 Demolition day has come at last. Days, actually. Which surprised us because we honestly thought if you just looked at that old shack funny it'd fall over. But it took four days in total to tear it down and wipe out an other old Hermosa beach cottage. Sorry. It took a day for the crew to unpick some parts of the house that are safer and more easily salvaged that way. It looked a bit like a bomb had hit it afterwards. But I've seen 'remodels' around here leave less standing, so I was looking forward to seeing more damage done. The next day they brought the bulldozer on site. That was Veteran's Day, and Hermosa rules prevent construction taking place during a public holiday. But they had to shave a smidge off the side of the house just to be able to park the bulldozer so technically a little teeny bit of house was demolished that day. That's my kind of parking, just make a bit of room for your vehicle and hang the consequences. On Thursday they really went to town...