As the new kid, transferring in late in the 3rd grade year, Paul’s earliest memory of Stu was of him hitting a classmate in the face at recess. While Paul remembers the classmate deserved the punch, he chose to keep clear of that wildcard personality – a choice that was made easier when Stu’s folks decided to homeschool him the following year. 

The boys didn’t meet again until freshman year of high school, where they found themselves in line for drills during summer practice, preparing for Junior Varsity football. Stu’s violent side seemed to have mellowed in the previous five years, and they shared wry jokes on the sideline while they waited to get put into the game as skinny second stringers (ok, maybe fourth). They found in common a love of music, a silly sense of humor, and both appreciated each other’s earnest, open demeanor. 

On the first day of school, Stu met a couple of other new friends who were committed to starting a band. With a skill set of four chords, Stu claimed expertise and volunteered to fill the role of rhythm guitarist and encouraged the band to recruit Paul as a bassist. Paul didn’t actually play bass, or even own one for that matter, but he had once mentioned that he might like to, and that was good enough. This was the start of “The Band”, a fantastic group of friends who had amazing times, and eventually, despite all odds, even became competent musicians. Today, the group still gets together a few times a year, and while there aren’t quite the same face-melting solos and head-splitting drumrolls there were 25 years ago, there is always music; nowadays joined in with wives and kids. 

It’s hard to earn money as a high schooler, but Stu would work summers at the school fixing sprinklers and waxing floors while Paul would work for his dad as a handyman and landscaper. The fruits of their labor were largely committed to helping offset private school tuition costs, but when Stu’s job ended at the end of the summer, he found himself envying the steady stream of pocket money Paul was able to keep earning with a few evenings and weekends a month helping out his dad’s business.  Whenever the opportunity seemed right, he would ask Paul to put in a good word with his dad or ask Mr. Halsell directly; always trying to show willingness to work.  Mr Halsell, having endured many jam sessions at his house which consisted of frantic drumming, off-key power chords, pizza and Mountain Dew by the truckload, and hours of fart noises amplified through a fuzzy, second hand PA system; and, having chaperoned countless 15-passenger van loads of squirrely and profane JV soccer and track teams (often attempting to moon their partner vehicle through the side windows); he wisely concluded that hiring Stu and Paul at the same time might not be the best for the reputation and productivity of his business. 

Around the second year of college, Stu finally got his chance to work for Mr. Halsell. Paul’s older brothers moved home and teamed up with their dad, turning his small construction business into a booming company. Stu got his first taste of “real work” as the laborer for the framing team and helper for the house finish carpenter (a good friend in the trades who now works as a building inspector in one of the local municipalities). The company still had the good sense to keep Paul and Stu from spending too much time together on the job – in order to avoid having them devolve to their Junior High sensibilities on the jobsite – but both young men grew and learned to thrive independently both on the job and in school; overcoming significant setbacks and challenges, growing in strength, maturity, and skill. 

Paul became the first to reach real adulthood when he got married in the summer of ‘06. Stu was best man in his wedding along with the rest of the bandmates, and counts it one of the great honors of his life to kneel next to Paul at his wedding mass, heads bowed in prayer with the congregation to bless his nuptials, punctuated perfectly with a simultaneous, subtle stream of saltwater nasal drip from both men; a consequence of the surf session shared with the rest of the wedding party that morning on request of the groom. 

Life changes when you get a family. Paul’s aims shifted away from just himself to the shared endeavors of his family; it’s a burden of joy, growth, and love; and one that was expanded even more when his first son was born a year later. His family was living in Atlanta, where his wife was attending grad school at Emory University. The need to provide was heavy on his shoulders, so he worked long hours, weekends, and any other windows he could to keep the cash flow in the home on track. His hard work and extra hours pushed him quickly through the stages of carpentry until he was leading crews and working on some of the most exceptional finish work in the South, renovating ancient plantations and turning them to modernized southern mansions, fine dining establishments, and design showcases. 

Life changed for Stu at that time as well. He stepped out of the work environment and into the mission field. For the next couple of years, while Paul cut his teeth on high-end carpentry, Stu served in multiple capacities, and multiple countries, most often leading youth groups and church camps, or building facilities and performing renovations for under-privileged communities.  

After a couple years of service, Stu felt the financial need to engage in gainful employment again, and with it came the call to greater maturity. He wasn’t certain where to look to start a career, so he got a job with Paul’s brothers to swing a hammer while he considered what career path he really might want to pursue. A few short months after hiring on, a shift within the company saw him promoted to a position running projects. Right around the same time, Paul’s wife completed school, and they moved home to the Central Coast. Paul and Stu were back working with the family, but this time, Stu was in the field running projects and Paul was in the office putting together estimates, budgets and scopes for those same projects. In a short amount of time, Stu was running some of the biggest and best projects for the company, and he was able to work in tandem with his best buddy once again in the pre-construction process. They were finally mature enough to save the High School humor for after hours and keep the tone professional in the office. But you can bet top dollar that it all came right back after 5PM on Friday. 

The recession was hard on everyone in construction, and Paul’s brothers were no exception. Work was drying out, and while they nobly promised Stu and Paul they would keep them working to the bitter end, both men chose to move on to other things. The next couple years were a mish mash of cell phone towers, odd jobs, and youth ministry for both Paul and Stu. In the middle somewhere, Stu got married, and a couple more kids were born. 

In 2014, Stu started Hawkes Construction, and Paul started Paul’s Construction. They considered working together, but their familial needs were different at the time, and their construction processes were different as well; Paul’s wealth of experience from the back office led him to run things differently from Stu, who had cut his teeth out in the field running crews. There was also some real concern over the health of their friendship under the stress of partnership. The families of the old band buddies still gathered multiple times a year and the wealth of friendship was too important to both Stu and Paul to risk in the face of the many warnings folks love to give out to those entertaining partnerships. Instead, over the next several years, their companies often overlapped and interfaced; helping each other out in times of need and advising in times of concern. 

In 2018 Paul took leave of construction one more time, closing the doors of his business to now go and teach high school at the same school he and Stu had attended 20 years before. He taught through a wild series of years including the COVID pandemic, while Stu enjoyed the excitement and heady draughts of success that come with company growth, and the pain of failure and financial loss as he weathered his own wild pandemic years in the construction field. The circumstances that brought Paul back to construction were complex, and less than kind, and it was an older, wiser, and in many ways more beat up Paul and Stu that met again in 2023 to consider working together. Their juvenile humor still runs undamaged in a strong current underneath their professional exterior, but that professionalism is not a facade; it is the maturity of challenges, successes, failures, and accomplishments across a variety of fields and platforms both independently and together. It took years of testing, weighing, challenging, and encouraging before they agreed to cement their partnership agreement in the fall of 2024. But now, in the context of Manzanita Construction, Paul and Stu feel they are able to confidently combine and share all of the accumulated, hard-fought wisdom, and experience they have earned over their years in order to bring an unmatched quality of construction service to the Central Coast.