Aloha and Happy Holiday Greetings from our family to yours. May the joy, happiness, health and success be yours to enjoy this season. Our Ifafamily wishes you nothing but the very best in the coming New Year.
Nervous, Happy, and Excited, but I am all stoked to finally say, we now own a piece of paradise. It’s nothing, but raw land and lava rocks! And that’s probably the most exciting part of this journey. Turning a raw land into a productive and thriving property. A land filled with breadfruit trees, papayas, citrus, taro, betelnut, and the list goes on.
After signing off on the ownership docs and stuff, I am off to submitting request for address assignment, picking and choosing contractors to do land clearing and site prep, septic system planning and installation, house plan and others. It’s is happening, folks….
And if you have not done so, please subscribe to our youtube channel, ifagalz, as we will be documenting and sharing the whole process with the hope you’ll follow and get some inspiration from our mistakes and hiccups. Will show you the whole ordeal. Hehehe.
Well, like everything else, the family is all excited. Just the other day, we picked the house plan for the site. And my project manager, RJ T. Albro, picked out the perfect plan that I too was excited to build. It was a simple, one story rectangle looking thing. But we were both voted out and the majority of the family members picked a different design, the one we are using for this site.
But let me explain what they did not know. The plan RJ and I picked was made ready for future ADDITION OR EXTENSION. The roofline has gable ends which allows for easy transitioning. This is where the majority of family members fail to see ahead into the future. They just admire the look of it today, but not much consideration of the future. Most of us do this without even knowing. So please, look beyond what’s in front of you.
I would rather we do a CUSTOM MADE home, but in Hawaii county they have an EPIC system. They literally named it EPIC! And from my research, I found it to live up to its notorious name. EPIC it is! Hahahaha.
Heard wild stories, whether they are true or not, I am on my way to find out. I told you this journey would be exciting.
From my dealings so far, everything seemed just fine. Everyone was very responsive and very relatable. The only issue I had was being transferred to the wrong island just to get answers to a simple question. Do you have services in this location?
Sorry, I went off the cliff here. Let’s get back to the house plan. Well, because some of these plans were already used before, the county may have little issue with them as they are already familiar with it. That will hopefully shorten the time for them to issue a permit so we can start the construction in a couple of months, hopefully not years.
Yesterday, I submitted our site plan septic system proposal to our engineers and they’ll take it all the way to getting a permit for its installation. So, that is already in the process. The reason I had to do that is because the pricing for their services is increasing in the new year, and I am just a poor folk that want to save a buck or two.
Have an appointment setup on the 28th of this month for a zoom conference with the Drafting Engineering team to finalize the house plan itself before they submit it for permitting.
The Site Prep contract is still being hammered out. We found a company that will do it for us, but they are trying to squeeze our project into a matching schedule of me being onsite. If you have not figured that out yet, I am a tree hugger. Hehehe.
I will not literally hug a tree and gave up my life for it, but I love those damn things. And I want to preserve as many of them as I could. Especially the native trees. Ohia in particular. I want to have as many of those trees left alone on my property if we can help it.
There are conflicting information out there whether I needed a land survey or not. The pros, at least the majority of them, didn’t think it’s necessary as long as the 4 CORNER PINS are there. They told me the property is big enough that it’s not necessary. But they cautioned that I get that done before selling the property in the future just to give the buyer a peaceful mind.
If you have not figured it out yet, we are getting a OWNER BUILD permit. I think the only difference from the other type of permit is the length of time the permit is valid. Owner Build permit gets you 5 years.
If you are a licensed or certified electrician or plumber in Hawaii county, we are looking to hire. We need someone to do ROUGH-IN Electrical and Plumbing for our project. Please let us know if you have a friend that can do that. Well, not right away as we will have to wait for the permit. It won’t be a bad idea to have you on our schedule so when the permit comes out, we are ready to rock and roll. Hehehe.
Hey, I run out of coffee. Thank and Mahalo for riding along with us this morning. I will keyboard off from here and will continue tomorrow morning if I find more things to share with you. Stay safe out there and Happy Holidays.
