Dirt colored houses

Dirt coloured houses are popular in Southern California. I don't mean dirt in the US sense, as in, soil. Although soil coloured houses are quite popular. I mean dirt as in the color of grime, or dust. Sludge is a popular house paint choice too. So is clay. Also bile. Oh, and anything that suggests putrefecation.

Don't believe me? Here is a truly random selection of homes within a mile of our place.

Our house was the colour of dirt when we bought it. Dirt with a grubby blue trim.

This picture is a little bleached out but in reality the colour of the stucco wa akin to the colour of dirty sea scum after a heavy rain. Or the wax and sea salt layer on top of TLOML's surfboard.

Uncanny, isn't it?

Well, our grimy days are over. We just repainted. White! Clean, coastal, soft white.

TLOML was a little concerned that it will show the dirt. But I think we can all agree that even a dirty white house is preferable to a house the colour of actual dirt.

Home improvement

When we bought our house last year - our first proper, grown-up, permanent family home (yes, we are late bloomers) - we did a fair amount of redecorating. Pretty much every surface was stripped or sanded and refinished in some way.

But we had to stop spending at some point. So we took a pause and made a list of projects we would return to in 2016.

On the list:

• New bannisters - to replace the weird, wavy silver ones 
• Painting the exterior - because why would you want your house to be murky?
• New front door - because it's ugly
• Replace garage doors - with something sleek and contemporary
• Proper dining chairs - to replace the placeholders we bought on the cheap

Not on the list:

• The pergola which became a obsessive desire, and probably cost more than everything else on the list.

Now we can ignore the unlovely view of our neighbours' roof, and the distant blinking of the traffic lights on PCH.

Now we always only look West. And we have shade. And a new cool outdoor room.

Who cares that it was never in the plan? It is making us very happy. The best laid plans, eh?

A Tale of Five Trees

The two beautiful tall palm trees we had to remove, because they were touching the overhead power cables (as I whined about a couple of months ago).

SoCal electricity sent around a crew to do it, slice by slice, as they shimmed down on their crampons with a chainsaw and a machete hanging off their belt. It was surprisingly quick: moments later our house looked bald.

The two large potted palms we replaced them with.

They are not as tall or as beautiful, but they will give us some of the dappled shade and rustling leaves that the old palms used to provide. The earnest dude at the garden centre whose advice we asked said they wouldn't be happy in the pots after about 10 years. When pressed though he conceded they wouldn't look unhappy.  To be honest, at the risk of sounding callous, even if they're crying on the inside so long as they put on a brave face and look good, I'll be satisfied. In the hope that in ten years time we have a proper garden to plant them in, we went ahead and bought them. So far they don't look too unhappy.

And finally, the one proud, perfectly shaped Noble fir we bought last weekend, and decorated to the strains of Silver Bells.

The DIY household

If the local message boards are to be believed, this is not a town where people like to do things themselves. I have seen requests for information on 'someone who can come and clean my grill' and 'a company who will install baby gates'. I've also met no fewer than three different women who claim to be professional organisers (aka tidiers).

But TLOML bucks the trend. He likes to do his own dirty work. He cleans his own grill and has been known to install baby gates. (And he has me permanently on staff as an organizing force). So when we decided we needed to start rinsing sand off before entering the house, he installed a shower.

The first shower he installed was from a kit, which made it less impressive. We were hoping the white plastic look would be Skandi-chic, but in reality it just looked a bit ghetto.

So he went back to the hardware store (oh, just realised they dn't call them DIY shops here. Maybe DIY really isn't a thing here at all). He bought various pipes, shower heads, joiners, flashings and the like and constructed an actual, working shower.

Best of all it has a foot wash, which is just the right height for Lady P to rinse her grubby little hands in. I am very proud of him. And very happy about the big reduction in sand in our house.

The problem is now he's getting some big ideas. He wants to personally hack down the massive spikey palm leaves that hover 20 feet above our deck. You know, the ones which are touching the power lines. I'm counselling against. I'm saying that he's made his point, he's very capable, but we can pay a man to tackle that hazardous situation with specialist tools. And I know I can find one on the local message boards.

On the American way of laundry

This is our garage. It includes several fire extinguishers, some old paint, a water heater, various wheeled vehicles, and a washing machine and tumble dryer. This is normal, in America.

It's very much not normal in the UK. There, if you don't have a laundry room, you keep your washing machine in the kitchen. Your tumble dryer? That's what clothes lines, clothes horses and radiators were for.

I think we can all agree that keeping your laundry in the garage (or the kitchen) is not ideal. Ideal - on both sides of the Atlantic - is a laundry room. Or a utility room where the washer/dryer rubs shoulders with a massive chest freezer, mops and brooms.

But failing that, in lots of homes in the US the laundry machines - including your dryer, even in sunny SoCal - set up in the garage. It took me a while to get used to. They're surrounded by dirty things, like cars, bikes and surfboards. But, like so many aspects of American life, it now makes perfect sense to me. Why on earth would you want to take up valuable kitchen cabinet space with something that has nothing to do with cooking and eating? Plus the machines are, of course, massive. They wouldn't fit in most UK kitchens I have known.

Suffice to say, till we buy that mansion with the laundry room, I'm a convert.

The wait is - almost - over

Fully six months since we viewed our new house and made an offer, and three months after we closed the sale, we are finally in.

Well, not quite. Our tenants have moved out and we have taken full possession of it. In theory we can go over there and run around the place any time we like, whooping with glee. But the flooring guys are in there sanding right now, making the running around and whooping a little tricky. And next week the painter will be in, touching up paintwork and crucially painting Lady P's bedroom door a jaunty colour.

For now, we are still, then, waiting. But at last the end is in sight. And there was a short window on Sunday afternoon, after the tenants left and before the decorating started during which we were able to run around and whoop with glee. In fact we rushed about measuring, and taping paint chips up, and saying 'can you believe it's finally ours?!'. And Lady P ran in and out of the small under-the-stairs cupboard in her bedroom absolutely beside herself that it was her very own cupboard. Then we celebrated with our friends, and champagne, before heading back to the Sugar Cube.

Lady P's happy dance

Just three weeks now till we can move in for real. Meanwhile there are sofas and beds to buy, and kitchen drawer pulls to select, and washing machine deliveries and cable switch-overs to co-ordinate.

We've gone through the moving process many times, but this is the first time we've been trying to buy bigger pieces of furniture, as opposed to smaller ones. And the first time we've looked for furniture with enduring appeal, rather than pieces that will make do till we move again.

Even the boring aspects of this move are thrilling, and the wait is almost more than I can stand.

We bought a house today

We really did. We actually did it! After months of looking, and weeks of painful paperwork, we just signed our lives away to an enormous mortgage. Here's to us! Here's to homeownership! Here's to the support of TLOML's generous mother, who made it possible. And here's to buying somewhere we can live in for a long long time.

We won't move till the summer when the tenants move out. Till then I will be mainly researching window treatments and cunningly low cost ways to refinish hardwood floors. Once we've done that, I will have some pictures I am proud to share.

In the meantime, for the curious, here is a shot of the  house.

Its a classic of its kind: the streets around here are full of these houses with the garage upfront and a deck on top. They do lack a little charm from the outside, but they usually result in a great floorplan, as the living space is all upstairs with plenty of light - and for us it means we have an ocean view from our living and dining space. As well as the ocean view we have two palm trees, a kitchen to get excited about (one of those cool pantry cupboards with the pull out larder shelves, and a massive range with warming lamps and allsorts), and plenty of room for guests and all Lady P's plastic rubbish.

And more to the point - and this is the main point - it is ours! All ours! And we can stay there as along as we want. Big happy sighs all round for finally putting down some roots, and West of PCH too.

Termites

I mentioned in my 'we're buying a house' post the standards that apply to termites. They are a thing here. As in, a recognised feature of living in a house. Home owners have two choices: tent the house once a decade and have it fumigated, or have an annual inspection and spot treatment. So the sight of homes covered in tents is not unusual. Here's one on Eighth Street, near our potential new house - which was just recently treated for termites, as part of the purchase process.

I'm not sure why termites are so common here. Maybe they (like me) like the weather. I don't think New England, with its freezing cold winters, suffers them. Or maybe it's not the weather but the wood. The houses I see here under construction seem to be made primarily out of wood, not the steel frames and breeze blocks I'm used to seeing in the UK.

I'm not sure why people build houses out of wood here, either. Maybe it's to do with earthquakes. Or perhaps it's just one of those inexplicable differences which is so thoroughly woven into the fabric of the way the world works here that it takes a while to notice. And once you've noticed, you can't stop noticing. And that niggles away. Like a termite.

I wonder if there's much more like that, which after five years of transatlantic life I have yet to spot. And I wonder how long I'll live here before I stop noticing those differences.