4-15-11 We gotta hurry up!! :)

Our friends love our house so some of them plan their events here:

Surprise Bday party in May and a Tea Party Sonia is throwing on June 4th! So I am pushing Robert along to get some of the items we can accomplish done! Jess moved all his stuff out of our secondary storage at the Pool House this past week so all the tools in my "living room" can go over there and neatly be placed on shelving. Big STEP!! I might be able to see my living room floor again!! Havent seen it since mid Feb!

Today Robert is hanging lights on the deck - yes its almost time to take down the Christmas icicle lights. Pics to follow soon! 

What's Next?

Well, soon we will be picking colors for the guest bedroom and living room. It's a scary thought though as I love color, but also trying to keep the place on the elegant side of "cottage". Maybe I should just stick with whimsical instead!

It's always something.... and this time its SPRING!

After months of working on THE project, yes in capital letters, we have been instead working on landscaping. It gives us some satisfaction to see things take hold and begin to grow. So far we have a new fuschia - they are very temperamental unless in EXACTLY the right spot and we got a miracle because by accident ours ended up there. Grown 6" already in 6 weeks. Typically when they are full grown they are about 4-6 ft tall and as wide as they can spread. Beautiful blooms. And no dont come by and pop ours!! As kids we did that to my grandmother's plant every time we walked by! POP. POP.POP.

Also planted cilantro and basil. I dont know if you know but in January, our beautiful basil plant went swimming in the pond. It never recovered and finally died completely dispute our trying to nurse it back to health. I wont mention who knocked it in but the person must have lost balance with the corona in his hand and kicked it in accidentally when he was dancing around the deck one afternoon.

We are dedicating one area to Asian spices - so far we have lemon grass, chives, pandena (sp?), and soon to be ginger! More coming as we continue getting clippings!

Two steps forward, and one back

So the elevations and remodeling all of a sudden came into focus! Well no problem as realistically we are doing less than 50% remodel.... (the as built portion! haha). But that 50% is from the assessed value not the SF. So our assessed value is $25K. TWENTY FIVE THOUSAND??? Is the tax dept smoking crack??? So we have to go get an appraisal and bring it up into the modern world!

The final design plan is coming together and apparent as we do a few more things each day and really know how we will use this house.  We do know we need to not get carried away with adding bedrooms!! All of sudden in our plans we had 5 bedrooms and 4 baths???? REALLY????? haha  So we are back to the realistic three and we did keep 3 baths and a powder room.

I tell all my clients to operate from a plan even if it changes sometimes. But have a direction! haha Now its time to take our own advice!

Two down three to go!

While Chris was here, he and Robert got the house leveled, the guest room, living room, hallway, and kitchen sheet rocked. Robert framed in a coffered ceiling (soffits with a vault) to add some architectural interest and remedy the question of what to do with the shed roof ceiling. We have the "disney" panel of lighting!

We are so lucky to have incredible talent as friends and family. We definitely will have a one of a kind home that belongs in Hawaii, not some lame Arizona house that doesnt look like it belongs in Hawaii. We have architectural resources from two people with incredible instincts who have designed multi-million dollar or way more beaches in Kona and Oahu, and they help formulate structurally the vision Robert sees in his head. Remodels are always hard because you have to many times work with existing pieces, and yet not try to make a simple cottage into an out of place cobbled together subdivision house. Too many people here do that with their homes. I want our "cottage" to be an elegant version of a beach house but still retain its original roots as a "surf" shack it was. To incorporate this takes a lot of thought and also sometimes as simple as leaving the granite behind. A surf shack may have had poured concrete counter tops but it would not have had granite ones. I want it to look like it was always here but maintained in good shape. In fact, my sweetie loves concrete so he has looked at the old driveways from numerous Green and Green houses to see how they did them - they used a lot of "tracks" instead of continuous concrete, and pavers and of course Brick (which Hawaii doesnt really have naturally occur for the materials!) So we will incorporate lava rock where some of the brick is used, and go from there!

I do admire all the diversity of designs here in Puna. Some are much less functional than others! We have a friend with a modern castleblock house but they incorporated big decks and over hangs that will catch the trade breezes! Thats a good example of mixing the theory of the plantation houses with a modern twist!

Big Day yesterday!

Don't know if you know all know that two nice kids - Kylie and Jesse have been staying with us - so yesterday Jesse fixed the pond pump so it doesn't sound like a airplane engine taking off!! Took him literally 5 mins! And the day before he got all the water from the house roof going into the catchment from Robert's directions (added 40% more water). He is the Robert mini-me!! Seriously - Robert 30 yrs ago!!! Today Jesse got the hairball out of the dryer that had stopped up one of the sensors!


Sometimes these little things make all the difference in the world!

Drywall .... or so I thought

We were lucky enough a few weeks ago to get about 140 sheets of drywall at no charge!! Big Score I thought - I can see walls with drywall instead of reeds.... until Robert told me .... we have to level out house FIRST! So now I am looking for 4 20-ton bottle jacks to borrow or buy. Of course as usual, no one has them. well HPM does but it only had 1 and it was $35/day. We need them for about a week. So I called a jack supplier and the jacks are about $40 to buy - cheap enough but weigh 23# each. So to ship UPS from MN to Kapoho is $150 EACH!!! unless we ship them slow boat (4-6 weeks).... and we only have a small window of opportunity for my brother to come back and help drywall (which as long as there's snow in his country he is happy to do!!)

What to do ???

Our Water Supply

For those of you that don't know - we get our water from a catchment tank (it's the equivalant to a mainland cistern). Rainwater gets collected in a tank that holds about 5200 gal of water. Since we get 60+ inches of rain a year this size tank should be fine at most times of the year. (July/Aug might be a little sketchy.)

Matiu backplastering the k-11

We wont go into the politics of Kapoho Vacationland and the KKWA (Water association down here) but suffice it to say that a few days before the wedding we lost our other water source although we knew it was coming. Robert and the guys had been working on the existing catchment tank, refurbishing it and putting the k-11 on it.  Chris (my brother) helped Robert plumb the pressure tank and pump and within 3 days we were back in business. We now have a sustainable water system (as long as it rains, and if it doesn't we can order 4000 gals at a time!)

We filter it and it is probably way more drinkable than any city water. I usually have a load of clothes in the washer and as soon as it starts to rain, I turn the washer on and do laundry till it stops raining. You do have to think about adjusting your usage - unless you are from the desert and used to being spare with water!

Overall the project has cost us about $1500 - and we still have about $400 to spend on the UV filter. After about 50 months (4 yrs), our water will be free from there on! (Water from the KKWA runs about $60-90 per month.) We did weigh the option of having a well dug but we are too close to sea level to not be inundated by salt water.

This is the tank filling up from rainwater. We have two sides of roofs draining into it right now and we are adding a third today!

The Summer 2010

We spent the summer beginning to do the "unseen" structural remodeling. Some windows came out, some walls came down, some finally went back up!  We painted the outside front wall even though eventually it will be covered in 6" hardiplanks. I bought gallons and gallons of paint from the Arc og Hilo's recycling center for $4 a gal so Robert is letting me paint everywhere even though in time it will be covered up! But for now it makes me feel happier looking at the fresh paint! This was painted in late August 2010. Notice dark carport is down and sunshine is coming in!

Empathy ! Looking back at the beginning May 2010

Front wall onto deck

In the beginning - May 2010

So we are about 6 months into an owner builder project of our own. It's a lot different in some ways from this side of the credit card! We thought we'd jump right in and be done in 6 months but money and commitments have held things up! Oh yah and we got married in December!

So in the next few posts I will try to catch you up with our progress so far! We had to basically begin at the beginning - rewire, re plumb, rebuild walls. Robert thought at first he would do a little re-framing and then in a few weeks sheet rock! He then found the electrical was scary. We had extension cords run everywhere until he and my brother got it all re-arranged in December.