I did say, in my last post , that it was all about to get boring.  I was right, it really did. But what I didn't realize was quite how time consuming, and intense the boring bits would be. Now the walls are up, it's really just a bunch of pipes and wires, and who really cares about how that stuff? I thought I could just continue dreaming up colour schemes and tile combos, while the 'rough trades' did the boring stuff. After all, we won't be actually laying tile or building cabinets or putting in showers for months yet. Several incredibly long and intense meetings with the afore-mentioned rough trades I know better. It turns out in order to do the boring stuff they need to know how the interesting stuff will work. Which makes total sense. How can the plumber put in drainpipes without knowing what's draining and from where? And the heat and air guy had a lot of questions about vents which I wasn't expecting but I now see were entirely necessary - if we want to...

 After the tortuously slow start the last month has seen rapid progress. We are now up to the top floor, and with a roof top deck we can sit and have a drink on (albeit out of a flask, sitting on camping chairs). Most days we have gone to see the house and found some progress. Most days a neighbor has stopped us and said 'it's getting big, isn't it?!'. And most days I took a photo - so as to create this pleasing time lapse video: It's all about to slow down and get rather boring for a while, as the 'rough trades' move in. Plumbing, electrical, vents for heat and air - all the stuff that gets hidden behind drywall down the line. If I'd had to guess I wouldn't have imagined that the legendary record label had named themselves after plumbing and electrical work. You learn something new every day I guess.

We've got walls! Framing the ground floor is done, and work has begun on the second floor. Compared to the snail's pace of the basement, where days went by with just coats of waterproofing being applied, or sand being moved about, this has been thrilling. Okay thrilling is maybe a stretch but it's certainly been satisfying to walk down there every day and see very visible progress. Here's thirty days worth of that progress, in 11 seconds. Now the walls are up it's possible to walk around the house and really see how the layout works and what the windows look out onto. So far nothing has surprised or disappointed us either, which is great. Here's where we got to by the end of last week: In the next couple of weeks the second floor will go on. And then, presumably (well, one would hope) the roof. Onwards and literally upwards.

Honestly, it was a nail biter. As soon as it cured we could see that the colour was good. A couple of days of polishing and the speckles of aggregate started to show through and we breathed a sigh of relief - they're pretty! But a couple more goes over with the polishing machine and the floor started looking patchy.  Ignacio said he knew how to fix it - but it looked worse before it looked better. For a few days every time we looked it we saw more patches. It was a dark time. But we should always have faith in Ignacio. Now it looks better and we couldn't be more pleased. By accident rather than by design, the colour and the aggregate give it a lovely beachy look. The scorelines, there to reduce cracking, look really nice too.  It's all wrapped up and protected now while the house is framed, and I guess for several months after that. There's plenty of comfort in the thought that this part of the house is completely done, and it looks just right.  

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...