Karen hired our favorite tree man, Will Pote, to have the large african tulip tree cut down in front of the house, it was a dirty and trash producing tree. We started clearing the plantings that fronted our entry stairs and front lanai. The before picture is shown at right. Below is the cleared front deck at the beginning of construction, with Babu, me and Babu's assistant Michael Karl.
    The first effort was removal of the front deck. This is shown in the next photo.
After that we formed the footings on which the Pavilion's foundations would rest. We added much #4 rebar and tied it together. This included vertical bars that would be incorporated in the four concrete block foundation walls and the six concrete block piers. I used walls to stiffen any shear loading introduced by earthquake tremors, quite prevalent here in Hawaii. Each wall ended at Pavilion corner anchor bolts with four piers completing the 12 necessary anchors.

      Two intermediate piers supported the midpoint of the two transverse beams that supported the 2x8 floor joist system.

     We brought a transit mix in to pour the four yards of concrete needed to fill the forms with the truck backing down the driveway onto our front lawn so that the chute could hit all the form cavities.

     After pouring the forms on Friday morning, a mason team led by Jeff Crone spent Saturday erecting the block foundations. We next set about locating the 12 perimeter anchor bolts that would produce the final geometry of the building. Since all the parts were pre-cut, and the 1/4 inch welded steel corner brackets, 12 in all, produced both floor and column geometries, their location vis a vis the anchors that were to locate and hold them to the foundations was critical in insuring the parts would fit in their final assembly.
     By the middle of week three we were ready to bring another transit mix with about three yards of concrete to the site. This time the lumber we had unloaded from the container blocked the end of the driveway so we had to wheelbarrow the cement to the block walls. For this we assembled a crew that included Eddie, Jerry, Joel, Jan, Babu, Michael, Karen and I. We took turns filling wheelbarrows , wheeling them to the site, dipping buckets in the wet cement and pouring the contents into the block cavities. We did the job in about an hour. We used a triangular wood frame gage that rotated around a center pivot to locate the 12 anchor bolts. You can see the anchor bolts in the photo of the pour crew above.

     We next cut each of the 12 4x8 perimeter beams and using another gage pivoted at the centerpoint, arranged the beams and the welded steel anchor bracket around this center. The anchor bracket, shown at right, is fastened to the concrete walls and piers by the embedded anchor bolts and holds the two adjacent perimeter beams in place while presenting a vertical fin onto which a slit in the main building columns fits and is bolted, so their location is critical.

.Once the perimeter beam had been located and fastened down, the two main transverse floor beams were added and the 2x8 floor joists were nailed in using galvanized hangers. As you see we also framed the floor back to the front entrance of the dome home.