Breaking Ground

Blake Writes:

After weeks and months of waiting – waiting for the drawings to be finished, waiting for building permit approval, waiting for bids from subcontractors – we at long last feel as though we are starting to build a house.  We heard the satisfying rumble of heavy equipment as our lot underwent a bit of regrading around the building footprint and as a long trench was plowed from our water meter and our new electrical pole to the point where they will enter the house.  We even put up our first structure: a Rubbermaid shed to house our burgeoning collection of garden tools.  It took half a day to build the foundation and another four hours or so to assemble.  For a plastic building it looks pretty nice, and the termites won’t be interested in it.  I was still putting in the final screws when Deborah immediately took to prettifying it with little flower beds.

I also now have a framer and a foundation guy picked, so all the major subcontractors are lined up – or at least the ones I need right now.  I’m sure we’ll have our share of more periods of waiting to come, but right now it feels like progress.

 Our neighbor Fred helps with the excavating.

 The big trench - not the work of a giant gopher, just the underground path for electrical and water lines.  In the meantime our neighbor Alex wants to play World War I.

 Concrete is poured to set the meter pole.

 Deborah tackles the encroaching greenery from the neighbor's unkempt tennis court.

The new shed - with Deborah's gardening touches.  We could almost live in it - which is good because it's almost all we can afford here.

Kitties and a doggie

Well again,  it has been a while since I wrote. It seems like mostly I would have the mundane daily things we all do in life to tell you about; how dull would that be to read? Unlike most years we are not traveling but actually living here. We are not as interesting in this situation I would think.

We did get our building permit the day after my last blog. I also got an agreement for my rental space to open my business. I will take possession on June 1^st. I hope to be open for business by the 15^th. I have spent much of my time preparing for the business; making custom sheets for my tables, getting all the appropriate licenses; ordering skincare products etc.

Blake and I also babysat for our neighbor Alex. We took care of his dog Lucy and his cat Momma Kitty for 3 weeks while he took a trip to Portland. I had a great time with those two and now they think they are our pets. Lucy in particular is very attached to me. I really wanted a dog, but Blake does not want the commitment. I understand that. So Alex has agreed/suggested that we should share them. He would sign a paper that says he is really their owner; that way Blake can relax. LOL So, I just bring the pets over each day for visits and take Lucy for walks. She is so popular; when ever we go for walks eveyone knows her. I have met so many people because of Lucy. The cat just comes over on her own as cats will do;she spends much of her time at our house and eats here too.. She likes to sleep with Blake at night.

 We adopted the pitiful stray kitty that lived here when we arrived. Blake named him Fao which means ugly in Spanish. He so ugly he is cute.  He only has one ear and that gives him an odd look; the other ear is quite damaged, from what we don’t know. We do not even know what sex it is yet; so we just refer to him as he. The cat does not seem to mind. He would hide from us in fear when we arrived and now he comes up on our porch for meals, lets us get close to him; I try to touch his occasionally. He does not run away anymore, just pulls back. He and momma kitty are great friends. He likes Lucy too. I believe that having the two of them here has made a difference for Fao. He made so much progress the 3 weeks they lived here and continues to do so. He has always lived here but was still a bit farrel. The people who own this home are on the mainland with family they are seniors with health issues. They found homes for their dogs but they just moved away and just left the cat. Alex our neighbor is a softie; so he would feed him once they moved. No one wants him…so he is ours now. We told Alex we would take care of him now that we live here. He is an old cat.

So that’s about it. Mostly I am going to post pictures. They are worth  1000 words.

we like to hang out together

Momma Kitty

FAO

I love it when Deb lets me get in bed with her. I sleep so soundly.

I love going in the car!

I am from the old country LOL

 I see dead people.

Some Nonhuman Pests

Blake writes:

You’d think a tropical location like Hawaii would be positively brimming with exotically nasty spiders and insects, but it’s actually fairly benign in that regard.  There are supposedly black widows and brown violin spiders (a close relative of the brown recluse) but they are not commonly seen and bites are quite rare.  Cane spiders are said to be the size of softballs and therefore quite scary, but they are non-venomous and actually considered beneficial.  Nevertheless, I don’t mind that we haven’t had the “benefit” of being surprised by one yet.  Much more common in the spider department here are the crab spiders – small, spiny little things whose webs stretch across vast expanses of space between our rental house and the surrounding foliage.  Unfortunately, the webs are frustratingly difficult to see and usually constructed at a height where they are most frequently discovered with one’s face.  When I hear Deborah shriek outside the house I automatically think “spider web” (if she shrieks inside the house I think, “gecko”).  She has taken to stashing what she calls “spider sticks” at strategic locations around the property to grab and wield in a waving pattern in front of her as she goes about her business.  It doesn’t always work – thus the periodic shrieking.  Our neighbor told us come May the cardinals appear in great numbers and feast on the crab spiders until suddenly they are all gone.  We look forward to May.

I’ve seen carpenter ants before but not until I came to Hawaii have I come across carpenter bees.  They’re big, black and bumble-bee-shaped.  Actually, just the females are black, but they’re the ones you mostly see – presumably because they are doing most of the work.  The yellow-orange males I rarely see.  The females can sting but don’t seem at all aggressive.  Their nesting holes were quite obvious in parts of our avocado tree that we had pruned recently.  Better there than in your house I suppose.

Termites are a big problem here in Hawaii.  As I’m finding out in our home construction project, the wood used is all treated to deter the pests and foundation posts are fashioned with termite shields to block them from climbing up into your house from below and eating it up from the inside out.  Older homes are more vulnerable and often have to be “tented” every five to ten years.  This is an amazing procedure wherein an entire house is covered in a giant tent to allow the enclosed space beneath to be fumigated.  I assume this process kills off the cockroaches as well.  We haven’t seen too many of them in our rental ohana but you know in this climate they will thrive.  Some are quite large and create quite the mess on the bottom of your sandal if you choose that method of dispatching them.  If you don’t feel like scraping their remains off the floor you can just leave it overnight and the tiny ants will appear to magically clean most of the gooey bits away by morning.  The ants love anything sweet also, which is why – as we did in Fiji – we have to put most food items either in the refrigerator or in zip lock bags or in air tight canisters.

Pretty much every time I work out on our property I see centipedes.  These can supposedly grow to 8 or 9 inches long and pack a very painful bite.  I haven’t seen any quite that large but I have seen 6 inchers, which are daunting enough.  They aren’t aggressive though.  If you can avoid accidently touching them and setting off some defensive behavior they won’t bother you.  They do like all the wood chips we’ve laid around our property so we have to be careful when pulling weeds (which we do often – I sometimes think we bought a weed farm).

Spiders, spiders, everywhere...

Garden Spider (harmless)

Carpenter Bee

Holes in Our Avocado Tree from Nesting Carpenter Bees

 Has the circus come to town?  No, just the termites.

Building the house, the Beach and the Business

Well, it has been a month since I wrote anything. Sorry about that but everything is in limbo right now. At least it feels that way and as a result of that there has not been much to say. At least anything interesting.

BUILDING… We don’t have our building permit yet; partly because our architect is in slow motion; that’s my feeling. We hope to hear something this week; LOL we say that every week. So we are still not building yet. We had hoped to break ground in early February at the latest.  The good thing about the delay is we are learning much about the building process here. Mostly how ridiculously expensive it; At least housing costs are. This has lead Blake and I into many conversations about how we can make our dream possible by downsizing, one must be flexible. It was so hard for Blake to reveal this to me because he did not want to disappoint me. I was sad and disappointed.

Well, after lots of tears, I did what I do best. I tried to solve some of the problem. My first solution was to go back to work and earn money; more about that soon. Blake suggested many different scenarios. I even suggested that perhaps we just sell the property and move somewhere else more affordable; but where?

Blake has been spending many hours and days trying to estimate what the costs here are for the materials. The Bids for contractors are all over the map and extremely high! Blake seems to have chosen a plumber and electrician so far and they are at least double of what we would pay at home.

So here is our most recent plan. Build the main house as planned and maybe downgrade a few of the finishes. We are not going to build a guest house; so there goes my vacation rental business “right out the window”. I am still going to do a home-based skincare business. Now that will be my main way to earn a living. I just can’t seem to get away from Cosmetology! We are not going to build our carport and perhaps later build a simpler version later. As far as hosting friends and family, that will still be possible. We will have the loft area and a sleeping area on the screened in lanai. That was part of the design all along. So no fears, you can still come to visit. We may at some point build a Bunkie house in the yard. It would be a bedroom for guests; but you would have to use one of the indoor bathrooms in the main house. This can be a good compromise if we decide we need it. I will have a better sense when I see if we actually get visitors.

Beach… You would think living in Hawaii that we would be at the beach all the time. We have been only once to actually sit on the beach or swim…Blake can barely swim; he has found it a bit easier in the salt water as it help him to float. I am teaching him to float on his back, swim on his back and he can swim a breast stroke a bit. He took swimming lessons when he was a child; he told me he had great fear around swimming and actually threw-up in the pool a few times. I am teaching him and he is a willing student. The best I can  do is teach him at least basics and encourage him. I am not that great of a swimmer either, but I can save myself if needed. We grew up with a pool and the Chesapeake Bay. I have always loved the water; however it is no fun to go in alone. We had fun that day and we will try to go more often. Blake did manage to get terrific sunburn that day as he likes to lie in the sun; I like to sit under the umbrella. After we played in the ocean he forgot to apply more sunscreen. I have been slathering him every night since with one of my skincare alchemy concoctions. It is working nicely he had little discomfort, now he is peeling so we go to the next level of skincare.

BUSINESS; I mentioned working.  My first instinct when Blake told me our project was financially way over our head was to go back to work. So I applied at 2 resorts that were looking for a cosmetologist. The interview process is 2 interviews and if you get selected at least a month before one is actually employed. That’s seems a bit extreme too me but that’s the corporate way I guess. I got a call back for a second interview from one; but by the time they called (over two weeks from my application) I had changed my plans, so I declined the interview. To make a long story short I decided to find a rental space locally and try to get a skincare  studio started. That way when my home-based studio is ready I will have clients and a reputation. That is my hope. There is only one other person up here who is doing skincare. I am in conversation with a rental space that should be available in early June. Hopefully, I can get a confirmed agreement and get the “behind the scenes” things that I would need to do done now. I will keep you posted.

That’s about all that new. Blake and I are anxious to get things going. We feel a bit in Limbo and as a result a bit bored…Amazing!

Now some pictures.

 Yummy!

 Getting a nice sunburn

 Acupuncture treatment

 Kelly-the acupuncturist. I just foiled her hair. She really needed me.

 The country life. Its all around us.

A visit from home

Deborah Writes

Well, it has been two weeks since I last wrote. It has taken that long to have something new to say. There is really not much new. Mostly, we have been busy with getting a daily routine. Blake spends time working on the house plans and works on the property often. He did build a frame for our bed that arrived; it is so nice to sleep in a king size bed again. He also built an extension frame for the full size mattress that came with the Ohana. The new frame fits nicely over the built- in that was already here. Now we have a place for family or friends to sleep; those who want to come help with building the house . Everyone else will hopefully come to visit when the house is built.

We did some planting last week with large cuttings from our neighbor Alex's yard. We are both spending time just cleaning and pruning the pre-existing plants that came with our property. I started a pot garden on our deck with Cucumbers and Chard. I hope at some point to transplant and move to a garden plot in our new yard.

I did find a fantastic massage therapist who was referred to me. She in turn sent me to an excellent acupuncturist. Both woman are very competent at what they do. I also am building a friendship with each of them beyond our professional relationship. I believe they will be my first two girlfriends here.

We seem to take a weekly pilgrimage to Kona, its about an hours drive south from our place. This week I was smart and packed a picnic, so we could take a nice lunch break at a park or the beach. We shop at Costco, home depot, lowes, walmart, kmart etc. We are slowly also finding interesting local places to shop that are not the big box stores I mentioned. I went to the singer sewing center and was pleased to see an interesting selection of fabrics and sewing notions, affordable as well. That’s a bonus!

We had visitors from Olympia for the afternoon on Sunday. It was nice to see someone from home. It was one of my friends from the Olympia chorus that I sang with; Rita and her husband Mel. They come to Kona every year for vacation. Rita and Mel drove up to visit us and they took us out to lunch. Rita also brought me a card signed by some of the women in my chorus back home and she brought me a beautiful orchid . I sent Rita home with some homemade Lilikoi butter I made. We showed them our property, building plans and the Ohana we rent. We also took them on a tour of our neighbor Alex amazing yard. Next year when they come we will be able to host them overnight.

Now some pictures.

 The pictures-above and below. the dump store and Keith who runs the dump store

 Flowers and card from my chorus- brought by Rita

 Rita and Mel from Washington

 Above Deborah and Blake in Alex's garden 

Below Rita and Deborah

 Alex giving Mel the tour of his gardens

 The new bed frames built by Blake-still need to be painted

 The transplants from Alex's garden to ours

Some pictures of the area-places we walk to,

 and the honor farm stands you can buy fresh grown produce.

 gecko hanging out in the Lilikoi in the bowl on the table..... AKA passion fruit.

 Hmm...proceed with caution

I guess the passion fruit worked!