New construction houses? (for sale, appliances, new house)

[Islandbound4]

Aloha friends, Has anyone purchased a new construction home, what are your thoughts on new construction homes? are they well built? Also, who do you recommend for installing a new wire fence? Some new houses that I have seen are only partially fenced. Mahalo!

[hotzcatz]

It all depends on who designed it, who built it and why. If it was built by a contractor from an off the shelf set of blueprints and built to be sold for profit then it won't be all that good of a built. It will be okay, mostly likely, since it's new and the contractor wants to keep a good name, but it won't be top shelf.

The best built house would be an architect designed house built for a specific client and the architect oversees the contractor. However, then the house wouldn't be up for sale since it would be the client's house.

As for the fencing, try ask a neighbor who has the type of fence you want who installed theirs. Most folks who build things will only work in a certain area since the island is pretty big and if it takes a couple hours to drive there, they probably won't want to do the job.

[steiconi]

Fencing tends to be a lot more expensive in areas with little soil (i.e., much of the Big Island) because stakes have to be set in lava. Add in clearing trees and brush off the lot line, and probably getting a survey, and you can see why the lot is not fully fenced.

[terracore]

We had a number of fencing contractors out, and all of them quoted a "by the foot" price rather than breaking the price down by materials and labor. That seems to be the standard. None of the quotes were based in reality, so we decided to do it ourselves. We were putting up livestock fencing with T-posts which is probably easier than chain link or wood.

Putting the T-posts into lava is a joy. If you have to put the T-posts into lava the easiest way I found was to use a 1.5" masonry bit and drill a hole into the lava, and then cement them in. It might be possible to use a 1.25" bit with a post driver and skip the cement step. All I know is that the 1" was too small and the 1.5" was slightly too large and the bits are too expensive to have a bunch of sizes of them.

Whether you have somebody else do it, or you do it yourself, makes sure you only use galvanized posts and level 3 galvanized field fencing. The fencing at Home Depot is garbage, get your stuff from one of the feed stores. If you try and skimp and use the green painted posts, the acid rain we sometimes get will act as an electrolyte and the metal differences between the steel posts and the galvanized fencing (or vice versa) act as cathode and anode, and will cause a weak electrolysis that either flakes off the galvanized coating from the fence and/or causes the posts to rust and disintegrate prematurely. On our property a previous owner put up fencing with the green posts and they completely rusted out in just a few years, and I'm having to go replace them all with galvanized posts.


We have one of those "off the shelf" blueprint homes. Ours is HPM. We did not buy ours new but it was only about 2 years old when we bought it. Another provider would be Argus. This was not a home construction that we necessarily chose because we preferred it, it was the only home that was for sale at the time that was within our budget and met all our minimum specifications. Everything is "builder grade". It looks like a "mainland" home. It's not going to win any architectural awards, but in our case since it came with no appliances we were able to add upper end appliances and replaced the flooring, repainted, added artwork, etc to make it less "cookie cutter".

[Islandbound4]

Thank you Terracore, Hotcatz, and Steiconi! This is much good information and knowledge to absorb. I appreciate your knowledge!