Do it yourself or get a professional? Sometimes, the best answer is both.  That's what Arnold and Millie Chun discovered when they set out in their retirement years to remodel their 30-year-old Salt Lake home. "We knew what we wanted, but we're not affluent people," Millie said recently. "We had to make choices and compromises."

For the Chuns, that meant coming up with a unique combination of professional advice and do-it-yourself enthusiasm. They hired an interior designer and landscape architect to guide them through the maze of planning needed for a major remodeling project, but ended up doing much of the work themselves, rather than using a contractor. "It's not something that would work for everyone," said the Chuns' interior designer, Paul Noborikawa of ADI Design Group. "But in some cases, it can help people save a lot of money and get the home they've dreamed of."

The story of the Chuns' remodeled home spans more than five years. It is filled with ups and downs, pride and frustration, decisions and trade-offs. In the end, though, "We got what we wanted," Millie said. Even before Arnold retired from his job at Bank of Hawaii, Millie was collecting ideas to transform their home, only the second one built in their part of the Salt Lake development.

With two kids grown and on the mainland, they had more space to themselves. But they wanted a redesigned open living room space and a large courtyard to share with visiting relatives and friends. "I'd been going to home shows and open houses and collecting ideas from magazines for years," Millie said. "I'd done my homework." She had clippings of specific design features she liked and had done some of her own drawings when she didn't see exactly what she wanted. But when the time to remodel came, she had no way to transform them into reality.

"We wanted someone to guide us along, but thought, that's going to cost us an arm and a leg," Arnold said. "We didn't think we could afford an architect, but knew we couldn't just hire a carpenter and expect him to build what we wanted." Finally, they took a chance on Noborikawa, whose advertisements Millie had seen in Honolulu Magazine for several years. "The professional advice he offered was invaluable," Millie said. "In the long run, it saved us a lot of money, too." Even so, the Chuns were shocked when they received the first contractor bids for their remodeling. There was no way, it turned out, that they were going to be able to afford all the improvements that they had dreamed about for so long.

It was then they began to think of doing the work themselves - with a lot of help from their professional friends, Noborikawa and a landscape architect he recommended, Dana Yee. Normally, Noborikawa said, professional landscapers, designers, and architects prefer to work closely with contractors and builders to ensure their client's desires are turned into reality. In this case, it was going to be up to the clients themselves to make the dream come true.

"Not everyone could do that," Noborikawa said. "There's a lot of professional expertise and frustration - that's what you're paying an expert builder for. But in this case, it worked." With Millie providing the vision, Arnold adding the sweat equity ("The goof thing is I lost 15 pounds doing the work; the bad part is I've gained it all back now. Shucks."); Yee and Noborikawa giving design expertise and professional craftsmen like carpenter Mel Kiyano hired for building expertise, the unusual team set to work on the project, which took several years to complete.

"I couldn't have done it without Mel," Arnold said. He was the carpenter and I was the apprentice." In fact they were the entire building crew. Much of the hard work fell on Arnold, the former banker turned day laborer making over his own house. He dug trenches for his backyard reflecting pool. He hauled lumber home from Honsador. He put down tile. He learned about everything from wood grains to Bondo; from waterproofing to sanding.

"I spent a lot of time in Eagle Hardware asking for help," he said.
Noborikawa was impressed. "I'd come over sometimes to check on things and find the two of them completely covered in sweat and dirt, struggling to get something done, he said. "It made me feel a little guilty. For sure, they weren't like most of my other clients."

Meanwhile, Millie often was in the kitchen preparing lunch for Arnold and whatever helpers happened to be in her topsy-turvy home that day. She worked closely with Noborikawa on hundreds of choices for interior tiles, fabric, paints, color, furnishings - you name it. "He's been so patient," Millie said. "Over the last few years, this stranger has become a very dear friend."  

The two biggest jobs were enclosing about 220 square feet of lanai space and blending it into the living room, and building an expanded courtyard, pool and architectural trellis in the back yard, which is now the centerpiece of the family's living space.

Yee designed a series of plantings to maximize privacy and color, but again the job of turning blueprints into reality fell to Millie and Arnold, who did many of the plantings, built the trellis - and maybe most impressive of all - did much of the spade work for the expanded L-shaped reflecting pool.

"I used to stop sometimes and wonder how I got myself into doing this," Arnold admitted, after it was all done. Especially on the days when his lack of training showed through - like the time he installed the toilet that backed up and flooded the bathroom. "Looking back, though, I have to say it was especially rewarding to do it all. There's a tremendous sense of accomplishment."  "Besides," Millie adds. "We'd never have got everything we wanted any other way. It's what we've always dreamed of."