kailua kona

[KoaKine]

Not to be blunt but its dead on the Islands right now. Im a Tile contractor and a Mosaic Artist were moving to Hilo at the end of this year Im going with my eyes open to the lack of construction .

[maxbab]

man thats no good. well god will provied.

[hotzcatz]

Construction is pretty much flat lined and shedding workers all over the place. Actually, most of them are shed already and off doing other things now.

I do drafting, so I'm at the beginning end of construction jobs. This year I've had a (1) small house addition go across my desk, however, the fellow is an out of full time work electrician and he is going to do the work himself. I think he is still working one or two days a week at being an electrician. There was another house addition - (2) a bedroom for some family members moving back with their retired parents since they'd lost their house, they are doing the construction work themselves along with an out of work carpenter friend of theirs. The last job was (3) a new house, nice but fairly small, being built by a carpenter who's just finishing the last week of his current project and doesn't have any more lined up. He wanted to get the construction loan in place for his house while he was still employed. He is hoping he will have work next year after he gets most of his own house finished. The current drafting job is a (4) goat barn which is being built extremely low budget and they are paying me in produce instead of dollars. The next project (5) is a deck addition to a house, that one is gratis since they are friends and there isn't any other drafting work at the moment.

So, this has been less than one small project per month, really meager but I don't depend on drafting for my only source of income. Chicken sales have done much better than drafting, there's been some clock repair and we just signed the lease on a small farm lot last month so hopefully soon there will be farm income.

This is very typical of construction work in Hawaii. About every seven years or so it flat lines down to nothing for several years, then it picks up again and things are good for awhile. The last time it flat lined, I took up driving a trolley full of tourists on Oahu for a year or so. At that time tourism wasn't down along with construction so many of the construction folks found employment in the service industry. The time before that when construction went down, I was doing upholstery and boat canvas work. This time I'm going to take up farming and see how that goes.