Moving to Toyland

As I sit in my home office and look out the window across the seedling lawn to the gray steel hangar not 20 yards away, I think, "Ah, this is where we are meant to be." I watch as my soul mate gently pulls a small yellow airplane out onto the concrete and preflights it in the shade of a large pine tree. He climbs into the left seat and waves once, just because, as he taxis away down the street toward the airpark's 3,400-foot paved and lighted runway. I glance to the right when I hear the engine spool up and can just see him lift off beyond the trees on the other side of the lake. A warm breeze rustles the tiny bushes bordering the porch railing. This has been a long time coming, I think, closing my eyes to savor the moment.

From the day we met some 14 years ago, we were destined to live on an airport. It was only a matter of time. In the beginning our flying jobs took us everywhere, but about 10 years ago we were finally able to settle into a South Florida lifestyle. Flying airplanes defined us both, but we were family people and we wanted that, too. First we built a house near the municipal airport. It was great to be able to ride my bike to work at Page Field, our general aviation reliever airport near Fort Myers. My husband loved the 10-minute commute to the parking lot at the international airport, from which he could hop a flight to his airline base for work.

Two years and two children after we moved in, he completed his most challenging construction project ever, a SkyStar Kitfox IV (see " Kit or Conventional," November 1994 Pilot). It had been the perfect kit to build in our two-car garage, and, with its fold-back wings, we thought that we could keep it at home. For years we towed it to the airport with a simple towbar. It wasn't as if the ride was a long one. We could be preflighted and airborne some 30 minutes after locking the front door of the house. Not many people can boast that.

It was good, but not good enough for us. By then we'd invested in a Cessna 210 that was also based at Page Field. The facilities were, shall I say, rustic, and as a result the venerable Cessna was experiencing a chronic case of corrosion. The corrosion was never debilitating because we caught it early, but it was an expensive, preventable disease. What we needed was a dry hangar.

While we were searching we stumbled upon Pine Shadows Airpark in North Fort Myers. The field was paved and lighted and had a few concrete-floor, 60-foot-by-40-foot hangars for rent. There was just one catch: You had to own property in the airpark if you wanted to keep an airplane in the hangars. The park was beautiful, with several wooded, one- to three-acre lots, most bordering two manmade lakes that helped keep the area above sea level and dry.

Even more exciting than the property were the people who lived there and the airplanes that they flew. The personalities included airline captains, airshow pilots, several successful business professionals, and even a few ace mechanics. Their airplanes were antiques, homebuilts, factory-builts, and some of the wildest warbirds around. And these aircraft didn't languish in hangars — they flew often and mostly for fun. Those who don't collect aircraft collect other oddities, including one pristine John Deere tractor set and more classic automobiles than I can count. I quickly renamed the park "Toyland," for, indeed, toys were what lurked there.

There were two airparks in our area, but Pine Shadows was the only one where the property owners had full control of the runway. Several owners also participated in a fuel co-op, so fuel was available if you were a member. It lacked only an instrument approach, but with Page Field's ILS approach 10 miles to the south we didn't see that as a major issue. I was a little apprehensive about the effect a move might have on the kids, who had just reached the ages where they had lots of neighborhood friends. Our younger child was in kindergarten, and we worried about changing schools. A quick call to the school board allayed those fears (she could stay in her school despite the move). It wasn't long before we'd figured out how to own a piece of this paradise. The Cessna moved into its newer, drier facilities right away, and the Kitfox soon followed to keep it company.

During the year it took to sell our house near Page Field we planned, drew, argued, and drew again our concept of the perfect airpark house. The hangar started out attached to the house, much like an oversized garage (many of our neighbors have this design). Then my husband came home one evening exhausted and weak from jockeying our two airplanes around in the rented, uninsulated metal hangar. Our building had to be bigger so that we could pull one airplane out without moving the other. It had to be insulated so that the temperature inside stayed below the temperature outside, instead of vice versa. There was just no way to staple a 60-by-60-foot hangar onto the existing house plan, and that's how we got a 3,600-square-foot steel building in our front yard. It has a certain beauty — but only if you can appreciate the contents within.

The house had its own special requirements. We wanted to build as energy-efficient a house as one could build. It isn't so much that we are conservationists (we are) but that we didn't want to see the operating costs of a large home eat our monthly budget whole. As we shopped around we also discovered another benefit of a well-insulated, efficient house: sound absorption. With a P-51 Mustang, a couple of T-28s, and a T-6 for neighbors, good sound insulation is a real plus. We also worried about the sturdiness of our construction. We wanted a house that could double as a hurricane shelter, allowing us to stay in our home for anything less than a Category 4 storm. Besides all that, we wanted a house with dedicated guest quarters. It seems that ever since we moved south we've been entertaining out-of-town visitors. Something about our mild winters, I guess.

Polystyrene foam block construction met the bill on all counts. The foam blocks, a product called Blue Maxx, go together the same way interlocking toy Legos do. Then the concrete trucks come — lots of them. They fill the blocks (now reinforced with rebar) full of concrete, and poof, you have walls rated to withstand 175-mph winds and with an R-22 insulation factor. Best of all, there is no tie beam and there are no stress points; the roof trusses can set anywhere on the walls, drywall attaches easily to the inside with concrete tap screws — and siding the same on the outside. Once we'd settled on the foam-and-solid-concrete construction, we decided to do the windows in film-reinforced hurricane glass. The film works triple duty as an insulator, reflector, and strengthener. Finally we decided to plumb the inside for cleaner, more efficient gas-powered appliances (OK, I admit it, what I really wanted out of it all was a gas stove). The goal was the smallest electric bill one could have in a large, Old Florida-style home.

It would have been nice if the county building code enforcers understood this better. As it was, the people who check building plans and issue permits are light-years behind those who design and draw the plans. They also prefer to deal with the ordinary. An airpark home sporting an outbuilding larger than the primary structure is anything but ordinary. The result was that our plans were rejected — three times. Each time we'd plod through the list of missing or incomplete items and find that 90 percent were on the plans — just not where the plan checker was looking. At one point we were told that the hangar had to be located behind the house. We didn't want the airplanes to steal our lake view, so we fought to the top on this issue. A short face-to-face conversation with the superintendent solved our problem. It seems that he'd issued a decree: Primary structures must be permitted before secondary structures on a property. His underlings misinterpreted the decree thusly: "The house must be placed before the hangar."

This little dance killed an entire summer. It was mid-August when we finally broke ground on the project, and I wanted to celebrate — we'd been through so much.

I was a little premature.

September brought record rainfall followed by a hurricane threat. Fortunately the hangar superstructure was already bolted together and the foam blocks firmly held down by their concrete contents. The wind and rain held up our roofers for weeks, though. As October wound into November, we began to see progress. The roof trusses went up, then the plywood and tarpaper. Interior walls began to take shape. Best of all, when you walked into the shade of the roofed and walled areas it was markedly cooler, even without doors and windows to stop the breeze. I smiled. These Lego blocks really seemed to work.

Three weeks before hurricane season was scheduled to end, however, a little storm named Mitch rolled through town. Granted, it lacked much of the energy with which it lashed Central America, but what it lacked in energy was more than made up for by the element of surprise. I cursed the builder for refusing to order a trash bin to hold our construction debris as my husband and I combed the neighborhood, picking up stray bits of drywall board and miscellaneous trash. The image of being presented a bill for propeller repairs from a neighbor who had encountered debris on the road/taxiway was enough to motivate us to keep the property tidy.

It was details such as the trash that slowly ebbed our enthusiasm for our contractor. If we had it to do over we would definitely consider prior airpark construction experience a plus on a contractor's resume. It seemed that he didn't explain to his subcontractors simple rules — for example, road vehicles give way to aircraft on the roadways (there is signage to this effect, but we still received complaints) — and the issue of site cleanliness surfaced repeatedly. Your neighbor with the pristine Pitts Special won't welcome you nearly as warmly after he's had his propeller reconditioned because of a trail of rocks that your contractor's dump trucks inadvertently dropped on their way out of the park.

We also realized that our trials with the county might have gone smoother if we'd bought the lot from the original airpark developer. (Pine Shadow's developer was long gone by the time we arrived on the scene.) In other airparks the developer often works with local banks to help the new buyer obtain financing, suggests a contractor, and even provides the buyer with architectural guidelines that have been preapproved by the county.

With all the hassles, it was still a real thrill to see the look on a worker's face the first time he saw a T-28 rumble by on the way to the runway. An early morning conversation with my plumber revealed that he'd taken up flying lessons after beginning work on our house. "When I saw your neighbor pull that beautiful Beech Baron out of his hangar, fire it up, and taxi off, I said, 'I've got to do that,'" he said, bubbling over with the enthusiasm of a student who has just soloed. He was working with one of my instructor colleagues. I felt a stab of guilt in my gut as I realized it had been more than a month since I'd been to the flight school to work. I'd spent all of my time trying to make sure that the final touches on the house came together smoothly.

The toughest months of construction were the last three. It was the best flying time of the year and I wasn't flying or instructing. Instead, I was supervising and working with interior decorators — neither of which are things I do well. By mid-February we had a driveway and the airplanes had a new home in our hangar. That helped. It was still excruciating to fly somewhere, come back, put the airplane away in its roomy new space, and then drive away from the house, silent, dark, and still under construction.

I likened the last month to my last few weeks of pregnancy. The house was so close to being finished that you could pace it and see just where furniture would fit. I could see it in my mind's eye, but it wasn't mine — not yet. The floorboards went down three inches at a time in each room. Pushing the workers was futile; they would finish when they finished and nothing — not free airplane rides, cold sodas, or constant supervision — could make them work faster. The move-in day loomed closer on the calendar. Three days before the move we faced reality with sinking hearts; the house was not going to be ready in time. We contacted the movers and rescheduled for two weeks later.

It was too late to take the kids back from my mother, who'd offered to take them on vacation with her during our scheduled move. So my husband and I bought some Chinese takeout, called some friends, and tried to make the best of it. The next day dawned clear, the sky as vacuous as my thoughts. I'd been planning the move for so long — I wandered past packed cartons on my way to the kitchen, stunned. My husband handed me a cup of coffee. "Let's go up to the house anyway and spend the day playing with the airplanes in the hangar," he said soothingly. It was more than the right thing to do — it was a turning point for me.

That lazy Saturday in the hangar, chatting with our new neighbors over a couple of deli sandwiches and sodas, was the first time that I really understood what I was in for. Airpark living means more than just the convenience of having your machines in your front yard and the runway down the street. It is a congregation of like souls, people who love aviation so much that they want to wake up to the sound of airplanes in the morning, don't mind a little engine oil with lunch, and relish the view of a lightplane crossing the horizon, low, just as the sun sets. We flew both airplanes that day, taking turns, then stopped by a neighbor's on the way out and sat in the shade of his hangar door watching a Cessna 152 pilot brush up on crosswind landings. In those moments all of my frustrations with the project and apprehension about uprooting the kids melted away. I knew without a doubt that we had found a home.

I open my eyes when I hear the familiar whine of the Kitfox's Rotax engine overhead. It circles — I wave. My husband dips a wing in acknowledgement and heads off toward the coast. I'd be with him if it weren't for this story, I think, tapping away at my laptop keyboard. I'm not worried though. Here in this pilot's haven, going flying is as easy as taking a walk 'round about sunset. I think I will.

Amy Laboda, of Fort Myers, Florida, first soloed when she was 16 years old. She owns a Cessna 210L and SkyStar Kitfox IV.