Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Hale O Laau Hua - vacation rental house

This is Hale O Laau Ola (house of fruit trees), a (my) vacation rental house in Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii, lower Kaumana, about 3 miles uphill from Downtown Hilo.
It is the house where I fixed the sink drain that I wrote an earlier blog post about and the louvre windows, and there is still some work left to be done.
Behind the house (in the picture) you can see the 3 lychee trees. There also are a few volunteer Surinam cherry trees in the front yard, but I think those are going to go in the long run because there is a really pretty one in the back yard that was full of fruit just a few weeks ago. In the back yard there also are some tangerine trees, jaboticaba (aka jabuticaba) and a bit further up some banana plants.
There may be others that I haven't found yet as a large part of the back yard is still well over knee-deep in weeds and some of those weeds are pretty vicious. The ti plants obviously are not weeds, but that gives some idea of the size of the weeds.
Longer term I'm planning on adding a mountain apple tree, avocado and quite possibly a starfruit. And I hope to be able to grow papayas again.

You can find Hale O Laau Hua on Facebook (only so far)

Sunday, January 10, 2021

Redoing louvre windows - and: this is a vacation rental in the works

At the house I just bought some of the louvre windows were missing the glass panels - and some were also missing rails.
I started with the bathroom window because it at least had both rails, but they were both stuck. With some WD40 and a hammer I got them both going, and thanks again to Wailana Herbst I got at least frosted glass - where I have to say that I would prefer the upper half to be clear, just for light. Part way through:
and at the end open:
and closed

Then came the kitchen windows which were missing 3 of 4 rails, there are 2 windows side by side:

. Calling around and going places to check and none of the re-use or recycling places having any of those I sent out email on a not work related email list at work and somebody (thanks John!) replied "Did you try Alumside?" I had not but as the pandemic, while not quite cured me off it, made it much easier to deal with my phone phobia (dialing, not answering, if caller ID doesn't work on your phone and I don't know who you are by phone number or you have a blocked number you're not very likely to get me to answer the phone, it's all robo calls anyway). I did a web search first, said "Wow those are expensive", called Alumside and found that not only did they have them in stock in just the size I needed but they are also less expensive than buying them online (for once, there's something available cheaper locally than online - and you can bet that I saved them the credit card processing fees). One rail half in it now looks like this:
Unfortunately I only found frosted 28" glass panels at the re-use center at the dump on Saturday, and while I can see doing the lower half frosted I'd prefer to have all of it clear, so I guess I'll call Alumside again tomorrow (they don't only have the rails, they have the glass too).

While the house and yard are not fully functional at this time, I do have a short term vacation rental permit for it that I just applied for renewal for, and a this time I would rent it at a discount. There are 4 bedrooms and 1 1/2 bathrooms upstairs (which is the vacation rental as the downstairs is only permitted as an unfinished basement because the ceiling height is too low for legal living quarters, but there is another 1/2 bathroom downstairs too). Cable TV and broadband internet is in the works,i.e. I haven't connected everything yet.