The House(s) that Rick Built

This is the introduction page.

The Beginning:
Once upon a time, tehre were two people, Rick and Christine living in a view home in the East San Jose foothils with a view over San Jose, from the south of San Jose to Fremont at the north, and across the valley to Palo Alto and beyond. However, all was not well, because there had to be more to life than the long hours, the incessant traffic and horrible commutes, no matter how short.

One fine day, they made the decision to move to Hawaii. After some considerable research, they determined that the Island of Hawaii, also known as the Big Island, would be their new home. They made yet another trip over to the island as a sanity check, to determine the real living conditions away from the tourist trade, checked out the various living areas, put their home in San Jose on the market, and finally, on 02 December of 1999, moved to Hawaii. Initially living in a hotel room while finding a house to rent, then another six months of searching for the right place to buy, they eventually purchased a home in Hawaiian Paradise Park near Keauu, about 15 miles from Hilo. Living there was fine, but it was definitely warm, at an elevation of only 80 feet, and the two story house was really a lot larger than they wished to maintain. Building an additional workshop of 1664 square feet helped some, as it allowed Rick to persue various art forms, including woodturning and working warm glass (beads, slumping, etc.). Still, there was more to be had. Rick took an IT position with Kilauea Military Camp located in Hawaii National Park near Volcano, and it soon became apparent that they should move "up the mountain".

Once the decision had been made to move to the Volcano Area, the search for a home began again. Quickly realizing there would be nothing that really met their reqirements, they decided to build a new home. One main consideration was the ability to build a single story home (no steps), close to the ground unlike many homes built in Hawaii. Typically, even a single story home is built "on stilts" so it can catch the breezes and better cool the house. In the Volcano area, this is not necessary, and besides, this would be an opportunity to get all of the features long desired, and with Rick building it himself, the costs would be quite reasonable, especially considering the escalating real estate market. Besides, having a contractor built house can be even more of a long and frustrating process in Hawaii than many places on the mainland, due both to the difficulty in getting materials in reasonable time, and the prevailing "laid back" attitude in the islands.

The process:
Well, it's an ongoing process, and nothing in Hawaii goes quite how you'd expect. For a diagnosed Type-A personality that moved to Hawaii for the slower, more sane live, this was expected, but not quite to the extent that has evolved. Please visit periodically to see the progress we're making.

We sold our home in Hawaiian Paradise Park in January, 2005, which should have closed by end of March, but finally closed in May, but that's another story for another time. We left a two story house of about 4200 square feet with two car garage plus a separate workshop of 32 x 52 feet, and moved to a 1300 square foot rental house while we procured land and built our new home. We hoped to be in the new house by Christmas, 2005, but as one might expect, our plan didn't quite turn out as expected. First, procuring the land was much more difficult than expected, because there just wasn't much on the market that fit our needs. as one would say, we "are limited by our preferences". Given we wanted to build a new, single story house and a separate workshop for wood and glass arts, we would need a bare minimum of a half acre if we really packed it in, or better, an acre or more. In addition, we were further limited by our preference of living in the Volcano area, at an elevation of nearly 4000 feet. Had we locked up land a year earlier, things would have been easier and less expensive, but the universe didn't have that in store for us. Due to the lack of available, acceptable properties, I began a search for appropriate land. By using the local tax records, I determined every piece of property that met our basic size constraints, we drove by, and if it met the visual test, I tracked down the owner and tried to make an offer. Tried to, because in many instances, people just don't want to sell property they own in the Hawaiian islands, no matter what their situation. I guess they just don't want to let go of the dream of sometime building here, and I can't say I blame them. Some 4 or 5 hundred calls and several months later (my cell phone records were many pages long), we had an accepted offer on a pair of lots in one of our favorite locations, on the high side of Pearl avenue in the Mauna Loa Estates subdivision, across the highway from Volcano Village. We offered cash and closed in a bit over three weeks. We recorded on 09 August, 2005, and we were the proud owners of a pair of side by side lots, 20,000 square feet each, for a total of 0.982 acres of land (about 200 x 200 feet). The price was in the stratosphere for raw land, when you look at the historical pricing on the Big Island of Hawaii, but there had been a big run-up of prices beginning in November 2004, which is just turning flat now in August of 2006. If it will ever turn down again is probably dependent upon the fortunes of people in locations such as California, because there isn't any local money to drive the price up like it has moved over the past year or so.

Once we had the land secured, we kicked up the effort on getting the house designed and plans drawn. At first blush, one sould assume we could consolidate the two lots into a single plot, and go forward with building... Not so, this is Hawaii... After lengty conversations with a number of the employees at Hawaii County building, we could indeed consolidate the lots, but the process was estimated at about a year, and oh, by the way, you can't submit building permit application until after the consolidation is finished. Conversation with several other landowners in the area that went through the consolidation process yeilded information that when the county was quoting 6 months for the process, it actually took 9 months to a year to complete. Need a formal survey ($2000+) lots of paperwork, several hearings, etc., and still not assured of success. Not recommended for anyone on a schedule at all... On to plan B, place the house on one lot and the workshop on the other lot. So far, so good, until several more lengthy coversations with county building officials, we have three choices for the workshop: 1) Declare it a commercial building, which means going through a variance to get commercial designation and special use permit in a residential area, meet all requirements for parking space, ADA issues including paving and signage, several hearings and input from neighbors, etc. All this for a workshop to be able to persue woodworking (mostly turning) and perhaps some warm glass work. Another long process with no specific end date, perhaps a year or more the way most of these go here. 2) put up one of the little kit houses on the back of the property. The kits come as cheap as $16,000, and don't take much to build, but we didn't want to cut down any more of the jungle/rain forest growth than necessary. This would allow putting up the workshop as an "accessory building" and everyone at county would be happy. Having another house at the back of the property might be interesting to use it as a Ham Shack for radio, but otherwise was just a waste of money and space. 3) Put a kitchen in the building, which would cause the county to see it as a residence (a Kitchen makes it a residence, but you apparently don't need a bathroom...). This would mean a separate septic system to handle the Kitchen, which adds about $5,000 to the cost. After much knashing of teeth and soul searching, it appears the best way to solve this was to turn the workshop into a house with a big garage, and move forward. Many sketches and some considerable effort expended on evaluating existing house and duplex plans caused us to design our own layout. The final configuration is not optimum for either a house or workshop considering the initial plan, but is clearly workable. The entire project will be built as "owner-builder" with Rick doing as much as possible, only bringing in others for the items that just cannot be done by one person, or where legal requirements make it impossible to function alone. Two items that jump up immediately are Plumbing and Electric. Hawaii, unlike most states, absolutely requires that a licensed contractor pull the permits for Pluming and Electrical work. How much of the work they actually perform is open to discussion, but a homeowner just cannot pull the permits for these functions. This is believed to be due to the stranglehold the unions have on some portions of commerce here, but it's often difficult to tell the underlying reasons. Given the large number of totally unpermitted dwellings and buildings in Hawaii, it's obvious there is something wrong with that policy, but this isn't the time or place for editorial battles.

Eventually we settled on a plan for the workshop that expanded it from the 32 x 40 foot plan as a standalone workshop to a smaller workshop with what we are calling a 2 bedroom 2 bath apartment. The apartment takes 32 x 32 feet (1024 square feet) of a 32 x 60 foot building. This building would be built on a slab foundation. Behind it we added a 32 x 48 foot pool house with a 14 x 32 foot swimming pool. Having it entirely enclosed in it's own building drastically lowered the expected heating and chemical costs, as the building would eliminate evaporation due to wind, and lower the ongoing maintenance costs. The house would indeed be built on the other lot, and evolved to become nearly 2200 square feet plus garage.

The new project began with a (hopeful) plan to get into the first of the buildings by end of May, 2006, but as you might expect, it didn't work out that way, because of a number of issues during the permitting and build process.

Floor plan and all details for the Workshop/Apartment and the Pool House on one lot were entered into Autocad, drawings produced, and reviewed by a licensed Professional Engineer. After approval, they were submitted to the county on 12 November 2005 and approved 02 December 2005. We could now legally proceed with getting the land excavated for the project. While the plans were with the county, we proceeded with hand clearing the area to be excavated, so we could see the effect of the plans. This involved hand cutting yellow ginger, chainsawing numerous Ohia trees and prepping Hapuu ferns so they could be moved later. A considerable pile of green waste was generated during this phase, and several cords of firewood was cut (and much of it stacked in various locations around the property).

Despite being "on schedule" with one of the best excavators in the area, it still took a long time before the equipment arrived on site. During that time, alternatives were expored (other contractors, other processes, including using a D-9 Cat, but were discarded for one reason or another). Our desire to

Following is a slightly blurry picture of the plot plan.

Each of the major chapters are available as separate pages in the navigation bar at the left. The bottom-most category "House Build" will contain the various steps along the way. At first, some of the pages will be blank, until we get far enouogh along the process to provide pictures and narrative of the process. We are starting with one building, so we can move onto the site while we finish the others. Once we have moved on site, we may have more than one part of the project active at one time, so more than one page will be actively updated during that period.

As we have time, we will be happy to respond to any questions about the process, or of life in Hawaii in general. As we live on Hawaii island, otherwise known as the 'Big island', we are in a small rural area and more than 200 miles away from Honolulu and Waikiki, which many people envision as Hawaii. In fact, life on the "neighbor islands" as they are called, can be quite different from the high population density you would encounter in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. Likewise, the mainline tourist trade of the Kaanapali area of Maui is also considerably different than daily life here.