My Picture Summary Of 2002
Hawaii
The first time I went to Hawaii in 95 or 96, we stayed at a small ‘resort’ near the fish pond in Kaneohe. Driving on Kamehameha Highway just by there, we saw this house up on the hill, and Tim said, “you won’t get me that house!”
Well, in early 2002, an email popped up about a new listing in that area, and the address matched. Well, we got the house.
The first think about this house, The Driveway to get to it. It was really steep, really. You would drive up it really fast and take a sharp hairpin turn to the left without hitting the hill or going off the edge, then hope nobody was at the top parked in the way. If you couldn’t make it up, it meant you had to back down. The problem with backing down was all you could see in the mirror was the ocean, nothing to guide you. I could barely get my small pickup up the hill and the tires would spin on the corner, so i took it in and had the differential re-geared, and the darn thing was faster and got better milage!
The house had bad Termite damage. The bottom floor which was like a small apartment was in really bad shape. A couple of the main beams were hollow and had to be replaced. Gutting that floor was first.
This house was strangely laid out, which I liked, but it was also very big. It had incredible views! Its the “you are looking for a house to experience hawaii” house.
We moved in at the beginning of March, and began the major reconstruction of fixing it from a cool house to an amazing house. At the same time having many friends come and stay, that had to put up with the construction.
By the end of October the stresses of all the construction and figuring out the Tims allergies were not good at all in hawaii, I stopped drinking on October 20. The doctor gave me a prescription of what was supposed to be lorazapam, but the pharmacy read the script wrong and gave me a different pill. Turned out to be one for seizures instead, but this was something that I did not figure out until a few months into 2003 after leaving hawaii. The pill did actually help on quitting, but I would not recommend this way of doing it.
The house was getting close to finished near the end of the year, but we knew what had to finish it to leave. Something I didn’t really want to do. But around the time the neighbor of the empty lot next door was coming to look to build a mansion to sell, he was from florida, and the ugly house that is next door that blocks the view and wind that nobody has still bought after all these years shows it. It was the right decision, I still miss the place, as a great memory in my life, with a lot of great friends and visitors around to scare on the driveway, or amaze with the views from the deck.