Fixing and Upping Hawaii Style
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The Current 2019 - 2020 Project!
also known as the "Little House"

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The Beginning
an extreme fixer-upper in need of just about everything, especially love

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Shingles!
Not just for roofs anymore and a lot less prep work than painting

3 / 11

All Done with Shingles
it took tons of really short nails plus a bit of cussing when fingers got smooshed a bit

4 / 11

No More Porch
that first step is a bit of a doozy

5 / 11

Starting Lanai Construction
as usual, start at the ground and work up

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Starting the flooring
all edges have a routered round over edge plus tons of sanding and painting before installing each board

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Starting Stair Stringers
hopefully the end effect will the steps that seem to float up to the deck and won't have to only use the kitchen door anymore

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Steps Done, Need Railings Now
there's steps on the other side of the deck so lots of work to build them, too

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Starting Railings
still not sure of the final design but we will figure it out. Maybe some sort of medallion in the middle of the 'X'? Then the roof next

10 / 11

Lanai almost done
still need the stair railings

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All Done
All finished and a picture from several years later

This picture is three years later, June of 2023. The house is much happier these days and has the most wonderful people, Eddie & Cynthia, taking care of it and doing amazing things with the yard. They started with a bare bones construction site type of yard and now it's a glorious garden. There's new fruit trees, flowers, bees and butterflies. A much happier house, especially from where it started. But, I digress and back to the subject at hand: restorations & renovations.

Other than fuzzy bunnies, we seem to find ourselves fixing and upping old houses rather a lot around here. Which is why we now have a separate section of the bunnies' website just for house restoration, renovations, resurrections, repairs or whatever it is that we seem to be doing. We aren't contractors or even really carpenters, but there's tons of house work (IMHO, the best 'house work' involves a nail gun instead of a vacuum cleaner) that can be done without a lot of experience if one is just careful and don't mind taking rather a lot longer than the professionals. But, since we don't have to pay ourselves per hour - or at all, actually, then we can afford to take longer.

As everyone knows, it's expensive to live in Hawaii. One way to keep expenses down is to get the, well, let's be polite and call them 'distressed' properties. How about 'properties of character'? Ha! Well, whatever their name, this page is for the poor little houses that seem to find us to be fixed and upped. Hmm, not sure where the term 'fixed and upped' showed up from, but it's sorta come to mean 'taking an old falling down structure and persuading it to cease and desist the idea of falling over'. Or some variation on that theme, anyway.

Other than lower acquisition costs, another good reason to get fixer-uppers is that they have more character than new buildings. Quirky little add ins that have been done over the years along with older ideas current at the time of construction of what constitutes desirable house layouts and other interesting details. There is also usually mature landscaping, with luck some of that landscaping will include fruit trees. Frequently fixer uppers are found in established neighborhoods where everyone is settled in and gets along with everyone else so that's also a plus. Should you want to be a neighborhood hero, get an old falling down house and make it not an eyesore anymore. There's a lot of good reasons to get a distressed property and fix and up.

Of course, there's quite a few drawbacks as well. Renovation is a lot harder than buying new materials and starting from the ground up. If you have to hire labor to do a renovation, more than likely it's gonna come out seriously expensive. But, it's a great way to get sweat equity if we do the work.

Although, in order to get sweat equity, you have to do the work. We're pretty slow workers and have been slogging along since last summer. Looks like we've been at it for about six months at this time. But, we usually only work a few hours a day and completely miss quite a few days due to either materials acquisition or going off to do other things. Fortunately, for this project, it was paid for when we started so we're just having to pay for the materials and some occasional labor. The finances are actually one of the harder parts of any sort of construction project.

The project was "finished" several years ago, however, it still had the gravel driveway up until a few weeks ago. Driveways are surprisingly expensive, although we got a great deal from Pono of Native Rock, it's still a big project due to it's size and slope. Should you need any concrete or rock work done in Honokaa, when you ask around, frequently and resoundingly the answer you get is "call Pono". Yup, they are absolutely right!

There was a crew of twelve people for a full day during the pour and there was a crew of three working on it for several days before that to prepare the forms. They did an amazing job. Who knew a driveway could be pretty?

With the installation of the official driveway, the project is now more or less officially 'finished', although it could still use a fascia (roof trim board) on the one side. With houses, there's pretty much always some sort of improvement which can be done. The next project, though, will be improving the work shop which is the building in the back of the Little House. That will be shingled and trimmed to match the Little House as well as some sort of rock wall around the Avocado Plateau. Hmm, may as well build a tea pavilion there as well, but that's an entirely different project.

Here's some basic pros and cons of fixing and upping, guess I'll start out with the 'pro' first:

😃 Reasons to get a Fixer Upper 😃

Cost of Acquisition:

A distressed fixer upper can be bought for a lot less money than a new build or a house in good condition. Sometimes, they can be bought for less than the cost of the land since sometimes an extreme fixer can be seen as a 'tear down' and considered expensive to remove. These can still be fixed and upped, but takes more work.

Established Neighborhood:

Older neighborhoods are more settled, have a known character and you know who the neighbors will be. If you 'rescue' an old house in the neighborhood and fix it up, usually the neighbors will be really pleased to see a neighborhood improvement.

A House of Character:

The building codes have changed over the years and make some styles of houses less likely to be built or not able to be built anymore at all. Single wall construction (a vintage style of construction typical in Hawaii) is pretty much no longer allowed. Older houses have nice touches such as double hung windows or glass door knobs.

Mature Landscaping:

It takes A REALLY LONG TIME to grow a tree, most fixer uppers already have mature trees. If you get a nice old fixer-upper previously owned by sensible people, you can frequently get mature fruit trees, which is a major plus. The current Little House fixer-upper came with a HUGE avocado tree that has really nice avos on it (possibly nicer than the avocadoes at our other house which are a named and grafted variety, dunno what the name of this variety of avos is, but they are really nice), coffee trees (currently with ripe coffee berries, as if we had time to pick coffee this year), lychee trees, macadamia nut trees, bananas, etc.

More Durable:

Having just spent several days shopping for lumber and other construction materials, the new lumber is not anywhere near the quality of the old lumber. With luck, your fixer upper will have solid wood floors that can be refinished and reused. Built in cabinets are so much more durable and sturdy than what's available from a big box store. And the new tub surrounds have the solidity of a soap bubble! Wish we could find tile board (that wall covering that is waterproof and looks like tiles) but apparently that isn't brought into Hawaii as standard operating procedure anymore. We could special order it, but that ain't the inexpensive way to acquire materials.

Most of it is actually fixable:

With older houses, most of the parts are actually fixable instead of requiring replacement. If a window is broken, instead of buying a new window; new window PARTS are bought. With old fixer uppers you get to learn all kinds of interesting things such as fixing sash weights and glazing windows. Need a screen door? Build one. It will match the rest of the house and the more expensive 'store boughten' door will look out of place. By the time the jobsite is set up and populated with tools, little things like building a window frame or a screen door is not that big of a deal. Especially with a chop saw for angles and a nail gun for putting them together. After renovating a house or two, you'll acquire a mad lot of skills.

It's kinda fun:

In an odd way, there's a lot of enjoyment and satisfaction in resurrecting an old house. Since the house is already trashed, you can blithely make changes and it ends up being an improvement instead of an oddity. Woot! You can also be frivolous and test out interesting things you'd considered in your own house but weren't sure if they would work or not. In this project, we have a refrigerator niche and the eating counter between the kitchen and living room which are sorta being tested out for the next house we build. I kinda want to try building 'disappearing' doors, that's where two sections of wall in a corner are made into a door way that disappears when it's shut, but the layout of this house wasn't workable for that so maybe next time.

There's probably more 'pro' than 'con' or we wouldn't be doing as many fixing and uppings, but I'll toss in a few 'con' although I'm sure you can think of some more, too.

😝 Reasons NOT to get a Fixer Upper 😝

It's a LOT of work:

There's quite a bit of hard labor involved in the fixing and upping of old houses if you're doing the work yourself. If you pay to have the work done, well, then you could afford to buy a new one and would probably skip this whole thing.

Fixing up one thing leads to another:

The scope of the project seems to expand as the project goes along. What looks like a little repair can require four other things fixed first.

Lack of Income:

While fixing and upping the property is not generating revenue. Which means cashflow could become a problem during the process. If it's being fixed at material costs only, it can be quite inexpensive (as far as these sorts of things go) but it's really good to have licensed electrician and plumber friends. Also friends with heavy equipment are really great, too.

It takes longer than expected:

With a new build, most times are kinda known. When renovating, everything seems to take longer (which it does since everything has to be adjusted to fit) and there's more things to be done than expected.

Hard to find parts:

Have you tried to find door hinges with knobs on the ends? Formica in fun patterns? Tile board? Sash window pulleys? Old fixer uppers are full of stuff you can't get anymore. Some things, such as the tile board, are still made but it is NOT available in Hawaii, nor will the suppliers ship it to Hawaii. What is with that? Tile board isn't a proscribed substance, an invasive species or anything that should be un-shipable. Now we aren't sure what to use around for a tub surround. Ceramic tile takes longer to install. Or even if you can still get the same things, the sizes have changed. A standard 2" x 4" stud for a wall used to actually be 2" x 4". Now they're 1.5" x 3.5" or somewhere around there.

There's probably a lot more of each 'pro' and 'con', but for us, we seem to find fixing and upping old houses to be worthwhile. At least, I'd hope so considering how often we seem to be doing it. I do also hope, however, that for the next couple of big projects we get to do a new build instead of a restoration. It would be so lovely to not have to fit things into an existing space.

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