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Two years ago, concert producer Matty Hazelgrove and his wife Kayce were expecting a baby and ready to buy a house. The couple were renting a home in St. Louis Heights — “a great place, outstanding,” Matty Hazelgrove told me — but they wanted to relocate because the heights were too hilly, the sidewalks broken up and unsafe for a baby stroller.

They settled on a modest old house on 12th Avenue in Kaimuki. The single-wall-construction, 1,440-square-foot, four-bedroom home was built in the 1920s, Hazelgrove guesses, with a second floor over a carport added sometime in the early 1970s. A low, lava-rock wall rings the 5,000-square-foot corner lot, with a big plumeria tree in the front yard, diagonally across the intersection from the level fields of spacious Kapaolono Community Park. The Hazelgroves bought the place for its asking price, $749,000.

“We thought it had good bones and charm,” Hazelgrove, 36, said. “It’s close to everything — Waikiki if we choose, Diamond Head, Kahala Mall. There are great running routes — and Waialae Avenue seems to be having a revitalization, with good eateries popping up.

“But at the same time,” he said during a recent interview inside the now-air-conditioned, 90 percent complete renovation of his family’s new home, “there was a lot of deterioration. There was one place in the wall where you could actually see through to the outside, all from termite damage.”

The seller, “an older gentleman,” had evidently lived there his whole life, Hazelgrove said.

The house sale was finalized the same week the Hazelgrove’s son Makana was born, in December 2013.

The couple planned to spend about $50,000 on simple upgrades: patching this and that, new floors and wiring, taking out an interior wall, new kitchen, paint, etc.

What followed was a costly lesson in saving an old Honolulu house.

Kaimuki has been a nice place to live since the late 19th century, when Japanese truck gardens and watermelon patches dotted the rocky, treeless hump between Diamond Head and the Koolau, a mini-shield volcano created by a secondary eruption eons ago.

In 1903, the Honolulu Rapid Transit Co. extended its streetcar line to the “top of the hill” on Waialae Avenue.

Rapid development followed. By 1916, the district was “rich with cozy cottages, pretty homes, and automobiles,” according to Edward B. Scott’s illustrated 1968 history, “.”

Over the last two years, the Hazelgroves basically gutted and rebuilt their post-and-pier house, typical of so much of Honolulu’s old, middle-class housing stock, into a fully insulated, double-walled home, complete with stainless-steel kitchen appliances and stone bathroom floors, despite a contractor’s suggestion that it might be wiser to bulldoze the thing.

In Kaimuki, old houses with yards — and mango trees — are becoming scarcer and scarcer.

“It was one thing after another, and another, and another,” Hazelgrove, 36, said ruefully. A noticeably sloped floor in a corner of the living room needed to be shored up, which led to the discovery that 75 percent of the foundation’s posts and beams needed replacing.

Removing a load-bearing wall exposed weakness in the roof, whose trusses and rafters had damage. In line with the Hazelgrove’s plans to rejigger the interior, grown more ambitious as the house was deconstructed, the contractor ripped out all the inside walls.

Finally, as Hazelgrove tells it, all that remained were the exterior single walls, the roof and the subfloor. The contractor had to put up temporary beams and posts to make sure the roof wouldn’t collapse, then rebuild and frame out the exterior walls, with conventional drywall inside, board-and-batten siding outside, and insulation in between.

“Once we reached the point where it was not going to be a single-wall house anymore, we had to bite the bullet and rebuild the whole house,” Hazelgrove says. “There were so many things to do, one right after the other.”

Did they ever consider abandoning the project?

“Well, yeah, Kayce had definite concerns, but I figured we could tough it out, so we pushed on. Turns out, we had to replace all the windows, and on and on … so we put up additional cash and got some loans.”

He shows me the house’s crawl space, where a few of the old beams and joists look shaggy and obvious among the new replacements.

The two small bedrooms upstairs became the master suite. The kitchen was moved across the house and combined with the living room into a toy-strewn great room. Two small bedrooms, a laundry space, and an office off the great room complete the downstairs.

Outside, stained wood slats replace the old wrought-iron railing on the front steps as well as at the rear entry.

The house is painted charcoal gray with white trim and black window frames, in keeping with its former dark color.

The small custom windows maintain the vernacular, plantation-cottage style.

“It’s small but totally functional,” Hazelgrove says with satisfaction. Other than the roof, which still needs replacing, the house itself is done.

The final phase is the landscaping: They envision running a wood fence atop the stone wall for privacy, leveling the small, fenced-in backyard, and adding an outdoor deck and grill, palms and hedges.

The renovation now humbly gracing its corner of Kaimuki still looks like the old house, only a little sharper, and cost the couple about $200,000, Hazelgrove says.

According to his realtor, the property could list for a little over $1 million depending on what happens with the landscaping — and the real estate market.

Both next door and across the street are big, newish, two-story stucco houses that nearly fill their lots. In Kaimuki, old houses with yards — and mango trees — are becoming scarcer and scarcer.

As they dwindle, they become more precious.

“New construction can be absolutely gorgeous,” Hazelgrove says. “But a lot of it looks cookie-cutter. It’s a little discouraging when you see another McMansion or a zero-lot-line house go up.

“I get it from a financial perspective, if you’re just looking to invest and rent the place out. But if you’re looking to create a home and help make a community more cohesive and protect its character, I think that’s an important investment, too.”