The Volcano House

I built this house because I was young and stupid. I had never built so much as a box before, and I thought I'd be done with it in two years. It took eight.

Sometime in 2015 I flew back to Hawaii to help my parents with small repairs around the house, telling them that I would stay for 3-6 months before flying away to another country. That didn't happen. I was up one night thinking about which direction my life was heading. Technically I was a college drop-out, having finished my film program at CSUN a year or so prior but not having enough credits to walk. Before college I had interests in architecture and interior design but the passion never really materialized. A good friend had given me a book about small home design years ago, before the tiny house movement was a thing. One particular design had always stayed with me and that's when I decided I was going to build a house. When I had moved back home I had about 60 dollars to my name. I had a couple part time jobs before landing a full time IT position at a real estate company. They were in the process of updating their agents headshots and since I had plenty of photography and film experience I pitched my services and eventually got a decently sized check that started everything else.

By now my family and I had purchased two side by side lots together. I designed my house in Sketchup, had the plans approved, permits issued, and then spent all the money I ever had on my first delivery of lumber. I would work my full time job, then drive up to my little parcel of land and build. I constantly watched YouTube tutorials for whatever it was that I was working on that weekend. Forms, framing, siding, roofing, windows, tiling. Nearly everything you see was custom built around the design esthetic I created for this house. If you do the math for all the weekends that I spent working on the house, you can truncate it to roughly 2.5 years. 2.5 years for a house, carport, landscaping, and yard, mostly alone with 0 experience isn't bad. But it does hurt to know that those additional 6 years were spent in an office collecting a pay check.

About a year and a half in while I was putting up the roofing I met the woman that I would marry. She wanted to know where I was spending all my time when I wasn't with her. We both worked on the house, poured concrete, stained, painted, and landscaped. When the catchment went up she stood on the inside of it for hours on a hot afternoon passing the large bolts through. We ended up living there on and off after the electric was installed and through the whole of the pandemic. While we lived in the bedroom I built out the kitchen and the lanai was my "workshop".

The end, the dream, always felt like it was just another 6 months away. I didn't have to worry about giving up since that was not an option after I started. But I truly didn't anticipate it taking this long, and that's part of what got me through it. It only became difficult during the last two years, as the house really began to take shape and I became more impatient. 8 years is a long time. But here we are.