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.

About that house

The problem with looking at real estate in the South Bay is that after a little while, you start to think a $3.75m 5 bed/4.5 bath Cape Cod style home is normal...

 ...when in fact, this is what a starter home looks like in Hermosa Beach.

 And while I might have enjoyed looking at listings for homes that are 'like a European Castle'...

..or which 'leave nothing to the imagination' (what does that even mean?), reality bites. For our budget, and to be West of Pacific Coast  Highway, we were looking at ads for homes that specified features like 'overhead lighting'. No, really: they were that short of features.

In the end we got really lucky. Our house has a tenant in, and the owner was eager to sell before the end of the tenancy - not a problem for us, since we're renting. So we think we got a pretty good deal: it's West of PCH, walkable to the beach, plenty of living space, and just a peek of an ocean view from the deck. Oh, and overhead lighting! We won't move in till the summer, at which point I will post endlessly about the house. Till then, we're enjoying our last few months in the Sugar Cube, which will be hard to leave.

Tear downs and dream homes

I read with interest this NY Times story about the trend in LA to tear down historic homes and replace them with larger, contemporary houses.

'Historic' here, of course, could mean an 1950s bungalow. While it's easy, as a Brit, to sniff about the  historic value of a sixty year old house, it's true that there are some beautiful neighbourhoods, old by LA standards, which are characterized by a conformity of housing, all built around the same time, and some really charming and quintessentially Californian styles. Like the Storybook homes in Culver City and in Hollywood, the Spanish colonial homes on the flat bits of Beverly Hills and the mid-century boxes that perch on outcrops of the Hollywood Hills.

Apparently the volume of new homes being built on the site of older ones is on the up, and these newer home bear no resemblance to their neighbors. It's a trend that's ruffling feathers in Beverly Hills.

For much of LA the historical preservation ship sailed some time ago. This passage is from Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust, describing Depression Era Hollywood.

The same description could be used of the Strand in Hermosa Beach - although I don't think I'd describe the diverse architectural styles which rub shoulders here as 'truly monstrous'. I've posted about the bonkers patchwork of dream homes here before and sure, it's not very beautiful, but I do like the freedom of choice it represents.

Although I may not wish to create my own personal Swiss Chalet I can understand the desire to build something new and bespoke - and be damned if it doesn't match the neighbour's new and bespoke house. My dream house would be a gleaming white box, but I'd take even a 1990s 'palazzo' over a charming old beach cottage with 1920s amenities. You do see the odd run of older homes in the area and I'm glad they're still around. But I wouldn't want to live in one.

Sweet, but probably doomed

While in the UK I wouldn't have thought of remodelling extensively - that's the stuff of Grand Designs and a move to the country - here it seems less out of reach. It's not an unusual thing to do, and some of the homes we've looked at would require or at least lend themselves to a rebuild. The house we're currently eyeing up is what's known as turnkey. If we can stomach the cost, we would maybe make some cosmetic upgrades before we move in, like redoing the floor and repainting some rooms, but that's about it.

Still, the dream of finding a sweet little beach bungalow, ripping it down and building a gleaming white box in its place remains alive. That'll be the next house we buy.

In America, there is no gazumping

In a recent post I mentioned our hope of getting a foot on the housing ladder here. In fact we have just positioned one toe on the bottom rung: we've had an offer accepted on a house.

I have been reluctant to post about it in case I jinxed the whole thing. After all, we Brits all know of someone who found the perfect home only to be gazumped (i.e. the seller accept a higher offer). Or to discover half the garage is built on someone else's land and the next door neighbour has the deeds to prove it. Or that the back garden is included in some high speed rail expansion plan.

In the UK any of these spanners can be thrown in the works, after you've spent a lot of money on lawyers and surveys and so on, and before you have a legally binding contract. Until you've exchanged contracts - often a couple of months after your offer was accepted - you can't really start celebrating. Let alone create home decor mood boards.

Too soon?

In the US, by contrast, once an offer is accepted, the buyer and seller are locked into a contract. The seller can consider back up offers, and there are a bunch of contingencies to work through, but they can't just shaft you by backing out of the sale and taking a higher offer.

And another thing. About those contingencies. Among other things, this is an opportunity for us to point out deficiencies in the property and have the seller rectify them. Granted, this happens in the UK too. But in a rising market you don't want to negotiate too hard, in case the seller walks away. You might ask for them to fix the damp, but if they won't, and you love the house, you probably wouldn't push it. By contrast here we are asking for window screens to be replaced, the house to be professionally cleaned, the TV bracket removed and the wall made good, and other requests which I think would seem faintly outrageous in the London housing market. The buyer can either comply, or give us a credit for the cost of the work, or say no - but they can't walk away from the sale.

When I say 'we are asking for window screens to be replaced' etc, what's really happening here is that our realtor is running around dealing with contractors, getting quotes, visiting City Hall to check the deeds and so on. In the UK once they've shown you a dozen inappropriate properties (and that only because you've called them every week to remind them you exist) and you've finally settled on one, the estate agent just sits back and waits for the sale to close so they can collect their cheque. Here, the realtor's cheque is a lot bigger (6% of the sale price, split between the listing and the buying agent), but they earn definitely their money.

One last feature of the home buying process which still has me bedazzled: the standards. I mean, that there are standards. Standard contracts for pretty much everything. Standards governing how termites are dealt with. Standard time periods within which inspections must occur, offers be considered, finances secured, and so on. Hence no conveyancing lawyer, I guess. It's all very clear and predictable.

It's incredible. It's like the home buying process, but with all the crazy unknowns and risks removed. So in fact, without jinxing anything, I can actually say 'we are buying a house', and know that it is true. Right, I'm off to work on my mood boards.

On the move again. But this time, we won't go far.

We've been living in the Sugar Cube for almost a year now - longer than we've lived anywhere together. And we like it so much we'd like to live here forever.

But the call of home ownership is strong. And we do love Hermosa Beach. I may never get over the fact that it's not actually Saltburn, or Kentish Town, but despite those drawbacks it is a wonderful place to live. Time to put down some roots, we think.

So we're house hunting again.

For once, refreshingly, we are looking for a home close to where we currently live. And when I say close, I mean really close. Like, less than a mile.

More than even half a mile east would involve being too far from the beach. More than a mile south would take us too far from Hermosa proper. More than a mile north would involve being in Manhattan Beach where the lots are bigger, the cars are flashier, and our best chance of a home there is a 1000 square foot tumbledown beach cottage with a 1950s kitchen. Aka a 'tear down'.

Which brings me to the other criteria: 3 bedrooms, a little outside space, and a reasonably liveable condition. And something else that's harder to express, but we'll know it when we see it: a street which looks like it might have good trick or treating, and a generally neighbourhoody vibe.

And so, the boundaries of our search are clearly drawn. It's a slightly larger area than the one I outlined for our London flathunt back in 2012. But not by much. Our criteria are somewhat more specific. But not by much.

The pink patch is our bubble: Hermosa, Manhattan Beach and El Porto

This is the roughly single square mile in which we can realistically live

The advantage of searching in a small area, where we already live, is that it's very easy to drive, run or walk by any prospective homes. And we know most of the streets pretty well.

The disadvantage of our nice, tight, close, boundaries? At the current count there is a total of 1 family house for sale* in this area. Just the one.

Good job we love the Sugar Cube. We may be here for some time yet.

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*within our budget. Which rules out that $16m mansion on The Strand, sadly.

A Sophisticated Snoop

My appetite for a bit of real estate porn was fully satisfied this weekend. And instead of flicking through DIGS magazine, I actually got inside these fabulous homes, for real. This is the Manhattan Beach Sophisticated Snoop, in which a handful of mucky-mucks with incredible homes open them to the riff raff. It's sort of like the London Open House weekend only you don't need to feel obliged to visit cultural or historical sites. This was pure and simple gawking.

I thought I would end the Snoop burning with desire and envy. But it turns out I didn't love any of these fancy pants houses. The sexy, industrial style, modernist house was my favourite but I soon dismissed it as not family friendly - too many dark rooms and sharp edges. The contemporary home on a walkstreet was gorgeous but definitely short on storage.

The 'Mediterranean masterpiece' was vast and gorgeous and also a bit much. There was a craft room, full of jars of perfectly coiled ribbon. A 'bake station' room lined with spotless jars of sugar sprinkles. It was creepy. And everything in it, including the laundry room, and the fridge doors, was 'Old World' Spanish style. Which feels odd in the South Bay in 2014. An apothecary jar full of Bounty sheets? That's just silly.

The other homes were just your typical, nicely decorated, well planned, spacious, $3m houses. Very nice and all that, but they left me a bit cold. Maybe that's just post-rationalisation, since aren't in the market for a big flash house just yet. Still, I enjoyed the snooping.

Lady P also had a good time. She rubbed her sweet little face on various expensive furnishings and tried to open a few drawers and cupboards she really didn't ought to. She also employed her new, comical, hands-behind-the-back walk, which made her look like she was really sizing these places up. So we all enjoyed that.

And TLOML? When we set out on the Snoop he told me he was looking for two things: elevators and stripper poles. We didn't see any stripper poles. But two of the homes we saw had elevators, which gave rise to a satisfied little chuckle. And he would have moved into the Mediterranean masterpiece tomorrow. He wasn't so fussed about the rest.

For what it's worth, the Sugar Cube house is single storey. No elevator required. We may not make the cut for the Snoop, but I still think it's the perfect home.

Fantasy house hunt

Now our real house hunt is over, and we are unpacked and settled in, I can get back to a much more enjoyable kind of house hunt: the fantasy one. I get plenty of fodder from my jogs along the beach, but I also like to scour the pages of DIGS, the South Bay's freebie real estate rag.

It is an intoxicating blend of the desirable, and the pretentious. The cover says it all.

'Retraite elegant' indeed. Pretentious, moi?

For what it's worth that home on the cover is not in France, but according to the ad, it easily could be. Or at least 'anywhere from Marseille to St Charles Avenue to the Hill section of Manhattan Beach'. Last week's cover was a Napa farmhouse. Only not in Napa, but in Manhattan Beach.

See what I mean about the weird absence of a sense of place around here? I mean, you live in a great, beachy SoCal town - why would you want to imagine you live anywhere else?

Another thing I'm baffled and intrigued by is the Honor Roll of architects. This ad describes the home as being representative of some of the best architects in town: 'starting with Pat Killen to Nota to Starr then back to Killen then Lee to Meyer then back again to the architect of this home, Pat Killen'. Confused much? Me too. But I suspect if I keep up my readership of DIGS in a few months that sentence will make perfect sense and those names will be as familiar as a list of BBC news anchormen.

Let's take a closer look at one of these flights of fancy. This home was apparently inspired by a 'personal journey through the hills of Tuscany'. Quite often when I get back from a nice holiday I decide to build a house to remind me of it. It's more cumbersome than a photo album but oh, so much more evocative.

Check out this Old World styled pool table:

And this Tuscan gym:

Here's another winner. How convenient, to be able to park your car right there in the living room! Oh, wait, or is that just a really luxurious garage?

Now you can see why I love DIGS so much. It's part salivatory surf through beautiful homes, and part just pure goofiness. I'll know we've made it when I'm actually looking through it for somewhere we might really live. Till then, I'll keep dreaming of a home in the Tuscan hills, with space in the living room for a fast car.

Estate agents with personality

When we outgrow the Sugar Cube and are ready to move into an elaborate mansion on the beach, how should we choose our realtor? I guess I'll just base it on the advertising.

Kudos to this guy for the beach community-relevant metaphor.

'There is a perfect wave brewing in the real estate market right now'.

A close up of the realtor about to hit the waves. In his suit.

But I think Alison, shown below, is that bit more creative. When you think about the South Bay, of course you think about surfing. So obvious it's boring. How about a nice Segway pun, complete with a shot of her in action on the beach, instead? Brilliant.

These ads are from DIGS, my favourite free magazine ever. But we shouldn't ignore street advertising. Given their love of a neat rhyme, I feel Kevin & Kaz & I would get along very well.

Choices, choices. This personality-lead approach is rather different to the UK, where all estate agents kinda look the same from a distance, and you just go to the guys who are least annoying. That's all well and good if you're just buying a house. But over here, it's much, much more than that:

So that's alright then.

Househunting:

After months of searching online, and debating our criteria (3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, outside space, since you ask) we were all fired up for the actual househunt.

So we hit the ground running: we hadn't even been in the country 24 hours before we viewed our first potential home.

Described as a 'Tree Section Gem', it was in fact a rather small, dark, tatty old house. It certainly is in the highly sought after 'Tree Section', but 'gem', it aint. After that we viewed a dishwasher-free home a block from the beach. And a bonkers salmon-pink house where the kitchen and the dining room were on different floors. And a couple of very practical but totally soulless townhomes. We saw some bigger houses in Redondo but decided it wasn't the right vibe for us. And a couple of larger homes which were just the wrong side (i.e. East) of Route 1 for us.

It's starting to sound like I'm picky, doesn't it? In fact, TLOML has told me I am just that. But it's not all nitpicking.

In addition to all those flawed properties, there are a couple we really like. One is a small, but perfectly formed beach cottage, 3 blocks from the beach. Despite that it doesn't meet my '2 bathrooms and a little yard' criteria, it's so darn cute, and so very near the beach, that I would definitely compromise. And the moment TLOML heard the surf, from the front doorstep, he was ready to move in.

The other place is on the most wholesome street I've ever seen. Kids climbing trees, white picket fences, and all that stuff. It has a yard, too. And two bathrooms. It has a jolly yellow door and olive and lemon trees (you'd think I'd have learnt my lesson with the fruit trees, wouldn't you?). But it lacks the ocean breeze.

On reflection, I think Malibu really ruined us for life. We have been saying 'We really don't need to be right on the beach' for a while now. And we've been saying 'Let's rent a place with enough space for us to really settle into, so we don't outgrow it before we're ready to move.' And yet, here we are, seduced into a tiny cottage by the ocean breeze.

When it comes down to it, though, the little house with the yellow door is probably a better long term option. There's space there for Lady P to learn to ride a bike and for me to grow vegetables, and for TLOML to grow his business. Fingers crossed we get the place, because I am fully smitten.

Though if it doesn't work out, and we end up squishing into the little cottage by the beach, I think that would work out too.

Welcome to Hermosa Beach

Well, we made it. We are here in lovely Hermosa Beach, a few days into our househunt and readjusting to life in Southern California.

Thanks to a half empty plane, and an enormous bag of snacks and toys, the flight was not too painful after all. Lady P's body clock has not caught up with the time zone change yet, and we're enduring some 4am breakfasts and long, shouty nap fails. But we're hoping it won't be much longer till she chills out and rolls with the SoCal vibe.

It'd be hard for her not to, because Hermosa Beach (and neighbouring Manhattan Beach) is all about with the chilled out SoCal vibe.

The holiday flat we're staying in is covered in surf and beach themed knick knacks. Judging by the number of houses we've passed with 'this way to the beach' or 'beach house' signs on their exterior, I think this is the way people round here decorate.

The local corner shop is adorned with surfboards, sells wax, and specialises in surf-friendly smoothies.

People are jogging, skate boarding and beach biking along every sidewalk. (Yes, I said sidewalk. When in Rome.) There are bowls of water for dogs outside all the shops and cafes. People smile and say hi when they pass you on an early morning coffee run. It's almost like being in Saltburn, for friendliness.

Apparently the kids at Hermosa and Manhattan Beach schools can opt for surf as one of their Phys Ed choices. The pier has a 'Surfer Walk of Fame' on it.

The beach is dense with volleyball pitches and Baywatch style lifeguard stations.

I could go on, but I think you get it. It's a nice place to live. In fact in many ways it reminds me of Saltburn: a small, friendly community by the sea.

Now we just need to find somewhere in it to actually live.

Househunting, again

We are househunting, again. Actually, we've been househunting for months. Ever since a return to LA was a glimmer in TLOML's eye, we've both been quietly surfing real estate porn. I'll admit I am often distracted by the high end, 'if we won the lottery tonight', stuff in Malibu for real, droolworthy surfing. But for the most part I am trying to stay focused on somewhere to live once our temporary accommodation ends.

So we're both constantly plugged into Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads and Westside Rentals. Not to mention Craig's List, which we will always favour because it's how we found the place we had on the beach in Malibu. Sigh. Anyway, sketchy surf shacks are no longer going to work for us. Nor will rabbit hutches, nor will cockamamie flats.

We need a proper, tidy, sweet little family home. With a grassy yard, or at least a decent patio. Preferably a shortish walk to the beach.

I'd like to live here

Or here

But do we need somewhere with 'nice energy'? That particularly Californian turn of phrase crops up on quite a few property listings. Call me a sceptic but I'm okay with just average energy, to be honest. And how about 'fully executive ocean views'? Seriously, one place really did claim such a feature. And so far as I could from the listings, they didn't mean a view of the skyscrapers of Downtown LA. Weird, and definitely not something that made the list of 'essentials' for our next house.

You'd think we'd have learned, from our NY experience, about the perils of househunting from afar. (We viewed about a dozen flats only to rent one we'd never seen, which turned out to be unimaginably small). But we've wandered the streets of Manhattan and Hermosa Beach on Google Maps Streetview so many times now I feel I know the place like the back of my hand.

Of course, there are real limitations to looking online. One of those is psychological - I know it's daft but I just can't get excited about any property with a grey sky behind it. So those streets which were photographed after the hazy marine layer lifted, and have that classic Californian bright blue sky in the background, shoot to the top of my list.

This time next week we'll be looking at these places in person. Yikes! I might delay any face-to-face appointments to the afternoon, when the marine layer has lifted and the sun is shining.