Our Village Sign Gets a New Lease on Life
After welcoming residents and visitors for many years, time and the tropics had taken its toll on our iconic Holualoa Village sign. The carved wooden sign, at the junction of Hualalai Road and Mamalahoa Highway, had seen better days, and the dry rot was on its way to winning…until community heroes Bill Wingert and Doug Kinnear swooped in to save the day.
This is Doug's first-person Talk Story of the process…
In early 2025, I moved to Holualoa and began volunteering with Holualoa Village Ohana, a non-profit group of dedicated to the culture and history of the village. I volunteered for their beautification projects, including the refurbishment of the North and South Holualoa signs.
The North sign was installed by Bill Wingert many years ago, and it is super sturdy (because I accidentally backed into it with my 4Runner and it didn’t move). The grass was trimmed, the posts painted and the sign was checked for worn areas, which were very few.
The South sign, however, was a little different.
This sign had years of rotting slowly developing in the lower back right hand side, primarily due to gradual sinking of the footing supporting its post. The front of the sign had signs of weathering, including a missing serif and a couple of missing coffee leaves, but Bill felt it the front could be easily restored if the rot in the backside was dealt with. Bill and I volunteered to restore the sign together.
As Bill is a busy professional artist and musician, work on the sign was sporadic, but extensive. After a month of drying and evacuating all the rotted wood, a frame was built around the sign to hold quarts of fiberglass resin filling in all the pukas left after removing the rotten wood. The front lettering and background was then restored along with the coffee garland. Everything was then painted with multiple coats of paint.
The sign was reinstalled on the sunny morning of Saturday, November 8th, the day before the Coffee & Art Stroll, leaving us hours to spare in meeting our deadline. Whew!
- Doug Kinnear
