Recap: Remodel sold quickly. (Too quickly.) So I packed. (Not quickly enough.) A month of visiting and yikes -- time to find a place to live.

No fixers available just now so, a rental. Which in this crazy market is easier said than done. The house hunt I thought would take a few days wound up taking almost two weeks, to which I can only say, THANK YOU LA QUINTA FOR YOUR DOG POLICY.

Between CraigsList and themls.com and Westside Rentals and the local Malibu papers, I got the search process down to a science. At one point, after about a week of looking, I thought I had found the place -- a cute guest house among the oaks on the site of a former summer camp in Topanga. And then the previous tenant told me not to worry about those scratchy, slithery sounds in the walls at night, he had never actually seen any snakes or rodents...and hello, La Quinta? Book us for another week.

Which is all a very long way of saying here we are, back in Malibu, in a sweet and charming little cottage on the west side of town.

It's small and quirky and comfortable and comforting with a big porch and a spacious yard:

And a pretty great view.