Almost There!

Zimmer Family
Residence

circa April, '07











Zimmer Family
Residence

Computer Rendering












Zimmer Family
Residence

circa October, '07








Hey Friends!

The final paint coat is on the walls, the electrical fixtures and outlets are hooked up and working. The fireplace is kicking out tons of heat! Our tile floor is warm as the radiant floors are up and working! The exterior siding is finally complete....we're almost there!

We've got just a few items (a dozen or so) left on the punch list to complete our 600sf addition.


Here's a list of some of the bigger issues:

- Shower repair. My shower drain ended up in a high spot, so I have to modify the floor pan
to slope to the drain.
- Add handrail to stairs.
- Add door hardware.
- Trim out replacement windows. We had the old metal, single-pane windows from the '50's in our main house. We had bought replacement windows from Pella, and Jeff and I cut out the old windows just before our storm last weekend (4" of snow!) I got the windows inserted
and weathered-in before the storm hit, but now I need to trim them out and make
them look perty.
- Add a cap to the wainscot
- Add two gutters

Not much work left, and some of it can be done during the winter months. Kathy and I have been living in the space since it got carpeted in August, and we have been loving it! It's great to get closer and closer with each passing weekend. Soon we will be all done with construction and turn our attention to skiing on the weekends.

I'm looking forward to hanging the Christmas lights this year with our new exterior profile. The new front gable should prove to be a great addition to our light arrangement. I also included an X-10 outlet outside our bedroom doors. This will allow me to program the outlet via my computer and us the programming from our home-security system to control when the Christmas lights go on and off. Just another guy-gadget. I'll let you know how it turns out!



Note to Jeff and Nate:
Remember how careful we were with laying out the floor heat fabric and wire? Remember how much attention we gave to making sure not to pinch or damage the wire? Well guess what. My electrician finally hooked up the wires -- and there was a short on the closet-side wire, preventing it from working. I was REALLY bummed. My electrician was able to hook up the wire under the tile and it worked just fine, but the other wire was grounding out when he tested it with his Ohm-meter, which meant that there was a fault in the wire, either a nail nicking it or a pinch in the line or even a point in the line that got severed. And we were so careful with the loud mouth! Then I noted that 4 of the entry tiles were under the other mat, because the bathroom floor would be warm except for the first 4 tiles as you enter. This made me even MORE bummed! I started thinking about where the problem could be. I was sure the carpet guy had nailed one of his tack strips thru one of the wires. The loud mouth had run out of batteries by the time the carpet was being laid down, so there was no way to warn us if he accidentally nailed through our wires. We knew the tackstrip near the bathroom threshold was tight, so I had made sure he glued down the strip instead of nailing it down, but the rest were all nailed down. I asked my sparky if there was anyway to track where the fault might be, and he had no way of tracing it. Then I remembered one key error (you guys may not know about this). The door openings into the bathroom and closet were designed for a 28" door. But I ordered 24" custom doors from Lowes, an error which I did not realize until the day I was setting them. Standing there with custom doors 4" too narrow, I decided to hug the hinge-sides tight to the existing opening and add 2- 2x4's to the jamb to fur the opening to fit the 24" doors. This meant that I had to add more drywall, tape and mud and abut the already finished walls. It sucked, but it was a good fix. UNTIL THE CARPET GUY CAME! I didn't even think about it, but he laid out his tack strip tight to the new opening. I was thinking about this when it hit me -- we laid out the wire 3-4" from the walls. Well, I'm sure there was a wire right in his NEW path for the tack strip near the extended jamb. Working off of this assumption, I pulled up the carpet at the closet door jamb area and found 4 possible nails that could be the culprit. I pulled the nails (thus losing one tack strip at the door jamb) and had my sparky re-test the wire for a fault. IT WAS CLEAN!He hooked the wire up to the T-stat and it's all up and running the way it was meant to be! YEA!! Just thought you might enjoy this little story, since we worked so hard and were so careful on installing the floor. I thought I was going to have to abandon the heated floor, but now it works! The nail must have just nicked the wire and not severed it completely. All because I never replaced the loud mouth battery!!!


Well, that's about it for now. I have some other non-house related pictures to post of the family. I will create a separate blog entry later for them. We're still working on the red-tape paper work for Kimmee. At this point we are planning on traveling in January to Korea to go bring her home! Other than that, we are just gearing up for Halloween next week: the kids will be going out as a pair of pirates! Will post pics!


On a side note, I would like to dedicate this blog entry to my cousin, Sean, who recently passed away from diabetic complications. He was almost 32 and left behind 2 children and his wife. It's tough losing a family member, and especially hard when the younger ones leave us early. He was one of the few die-hard Bronco fans in our big family and Kathy and I would always enjoy talking football with him at Christmas. One year we had wrapped up a Bronco's sweatshirt for the family gift exchange, which he immediately snatched up. His joy in "winning" our sweatshirt still brings us smiles.

Rest-in-peace, Sean. You will be deeply missed. We will continue to keep your family in our thoughts and prayers.

Presenting: Kim Mee Zimmer

Today, Wednesday September 19th, 2007 -- we received a much awaited call from our adoption agency: they made a match!

At 4pm today, they sent over her information and pictures and it was love at first sight. There she was: Kim Zimmer, waiting to be adopted by her American parents!

We are so excited. I know that this home addition commanded most of our time this summer, but the real reason we needed the space was for the additional child we wanted to add to our family. Now with the addition nearly complete, we can turn our full attention to bringing our little girl home.

So Mee Bae was born April 7th, 2007 to an unwed mother and father (21 yrs old). Knowing that they could not raise this child, they gave her up for adoption. She has been living with a foster family since her birth and is very, very attached to her foster mom (sigh).

She is a healthy and alert 5 month old, and as soon as we sign the paper work and send in our check, the legal red tape will begin being cut and we will become her foster parents with finalization following about 6 months later. Thus, sometime shortly into the new year we will be making a trip to Korea to bring back our daughter!

The kids are already in love with her and are very, very happy to add her to our family unit.

Her name is "So" = "bright" and "Mee" = "beautiful" and "Bae" = her family name.

We have always referred to our unknown daughter as Kim, or "Kimmi", knowing that we would change her name to this once we adopted her. Kathy calls our kids "miss beautiful" and "mr. handsome", so it's befitting that So Mee means "bright and beautiful". Note that by incorporating her Korean name "Mee" (beautiful), it yields: Kim Mee Zimmer, or Kimmi Zimmer! Pretty cool!!

We are very excited to bring her home and appreciate all of your thoughts, prayers, and encouragement as we snowball through the next four months. It takes a village to raise a child!

Can't wait for each and everyone of you to meet our new daughter! Please, please post a message for us here, all of us will be checking this posting and sharing it with others. If you just leave a message as "anonymous" you don't need to create an account, and we'd love to see your responses!

Your friends, the Zimmers: party of five!

UPDATE: Kim (So Mee) was born in Seosan City, South Korea (pop. 150,000). Here is link to her hometown: http://eng.seosantour.net/default.asp?go=40

Seosan City (or Sosan) is located about 60 miles to the south and west of Seoul, South Korea. And about 6,230 miles from her soon-to-be home in Aurora, CO. (thx Google Earth!)

OUCH!!!!!!!!!!

Ever wonder what a 33-year old architect does on his weekends? Well, it varies. This weekend I got into a bar fight, decided to shave my head, and create a 2" gash in my melon!

Let me explain...




It's actually kind of embarrassing, but I'm not one to be shy. So Friday night I walked into the bathroom and dropped something on the floor, bent over to pick it up, and jerked my head up right into the towel bar. OUCH! Now according to the photos you might think that the towel bar won, but I got to tell you -- I knocked it down with one punch and it did NOT get back up!

So immediately after gouging my melon, I put my hand over the wound. I could feel the liquid oozing thru my palm. I took a brief glance, saw a LOT of blood, and shouted for Kathy -- who was already enjoying her 3rd stage of sleep on the couch. She came running, saw my head, SCREAMED, and ran for a towel. Jade, who was still awake, came sauntering into the bathroom, thinking I was "just faking". At the first sight of blood, she tucked tail and ran! Kathy returned with a towel about 30-seconds later, then had to sit down, then had to lie down. I sat there applying pressure to my scalp, weighing whether-or-not to make the trip to ER.

The thing with head wounds (this is my second): they don't just bleed, the blood sack below your scalp explodes! So there's a lot of blood, initially -- and then it stops.

I phoned Jeff, my buddy across the street who is an EMT and asked him to look at it. I went over to his hosue, we cleaned up the wound and decided not to do stitches, but that a butterfly bandage would suffice. Shaved my head a bit more to make room for the bandages (unfortunately I cannot blame the receding hairline on the wound, rather my ancestors!) Jeff gave it some tenderly EMT lovin' and taped me up. I just removed the bandages this afternoon in time for our final 'Sweat Equity' taping.

What a weekend ride! I wore a hat to church last night because I had a big 'ol bandage covering up the wound....didn't want to field a barrage of questions. Anyone who caught me without the hat definitely gave me second and third looks!

The wound has healed up well. It was more of a gouge than a slice, which is why stitches would not have really helped. Now I just got to let it heal and let my hair grow back!

If you look closely to the new 2" gash you can see the old wound just above it (6 stitches). It looks like when I go to complete the trifecta I should aim for another horiz. wound to complete the "Z". Can you see it? The top scar that is healed combined with the new scar create 2/3's of a capital letter "Z". Almost there.....I'll be like the Zimmer Family Harry Potter: the Boy with the Scar!

So that's how we started the weekend!

We finished the weekend by completing most of our punch list: touch-up paint, adding window hardware, clean-up, closet touches, etc... Now we have just a few little items left to complete the addition. Trim, some hardware, base board. But we're getting there! It's exciting, and we receive high complements from everyone that visits. It's good to be close to the finish line.

I'll have my buddy who is a photographer swing by and snap some better, more prof. shots and get the finals posted up here. Keep checking for the final blog....

Carpet's in, we're movin' on up!

....took a whole lot of tryin', just to get up that hill!


Wow! I didn't realize how many of you were checking in on us. You will note a new feature I've added to the site to track where people are watching us from. Portugal? India? Athens? Peru? Wow! Crazy stuff! I;m really hoping for a hit from Africa (Madagascar?) and Australia, so if you know anyone there....please pass long the link!




We got the carpet installed on Friday. It looks fantastic! We spent the weekend moving our stuff out of the living room and into our new space. Didn't take too long to fill up the new closet. Can Americans ever really have enough closet space?








The lighting is just perfect for us. We have the accent lights that shine on the fireplace. The ceiling fan lights that add a comfortable level for the space. And the reading lights above the bed which I took much advantage of this weekend, diving into a Clive Cussler novel. I just love the way the steel, and electrical conduit, and light fixtures, and beams interact with each other and are exposed on the ceiling. The pictures really don't do this composition justice: it's a must see!


Those of you who (embarrassingly) visited our house and witnessed the massive pile of STUFF in the living room: it's all gone! Hard to believe, but Kathy spent the weekend clearing it out and restoring the room (and house) to order. It looks great! No clutter -- and I had forgotten that we had a couch in there!


Everyone keeps asking, "Is it done?" Well, not quite yet. We have a bunch and bunch of details left to do: paint touch-up, plumbing touches, electrical punch items, the siding, the rail cap, staining and sealing the wood members.....it'll keep us busy! Plus the downstairs spaces (Jade's room and living room) need to be finished and painted and trimmed out. But our big accomplishment of moving our bed into the space and Jade's bed into her new space is complete.

The network will be out in a week and a half to wrap up the final shots for the show. I'm hoping the show will air sometime by the end of September, first of October. Will keep you posted with that progress.












Another shot of our tub in place: it's such a great tub!









Here's a shot of our vanities on the opposite wall from the tub. They match beautifully! They were our bargain buy from Lowes.









Today was Kaleb's first day of Kindergarden, and Jade's second week of 3rd grade. They look so cute in their uniforms! They walked to school with Jordan, a neighborhood eight-grader.

Are we there yet?

Hey Friends!

First of all, let me apologize to everyone out there who has been watching. I did not realize how popular this site had become! I have received many, many calls and emails asking when the next update would be. Honestly, I didn't think anyone was really watching this site? Boy, was I wrong! So sorry for leaving you all in the dark the past few weeks.




Explanation: Kathy and I have been working night and day to get this project wrapped up! PLUS, I have two home remodels I'm trying to wrap up for some very important people, so any extra time I have had has been focused on their projects, not my blogspot.





Cure: I'm taking a break, a breather, and thought it would be nice to update the crew. I am very, very tire right now -- but somewhat relieved. Today we are getting carpet, which means that we are moving upstairs TONIGHT!!! Crazy, eh? Last night I had a punchlist a mile long in order to compete everything in time for the carpet installers today. Plus we had to clean out the 3 months of accumulated CRAP that was everywhere! Wait, I need to back up a bit.

The last posting I showed you some great shots of our fireplace install, John helping us mud, and Kathy painting.

So the fireplace is finally hooked up and RUNNING! We got the pilot light lit, and the gas is burning -- it's a beautiful unit, great install! Not too shabby for my first attempt as a mason!

Kathy's been a trooper with the painting. The colors are GREAT! We recently stained the wood beams and the color for the beams is fantastic. Really brings the theme together! We did, however, manage to drop 2 (not 1) quarts of stain in our house. One downstairs on our dining room carpet (that was suppose to STAY!), and one more quart upstairs in the m. bedroom -- it fell off of a wobbly ladder that I was adjusting -- duh! Oh well, :-)


John, our faithful drywall mudder, showed up at our doorstep in crutches a few weeks ago. We were on the edge of being done with the mudding, and he injured his knee. He's better now, but we were really concerned for him at the time. And there was no way he was getting back onto a ladder to mud our walls! So on the downside, that left just me to finish the mudding, and the tiling, and the trim, and the .....oh, you get the point!


Bathroom: It's done! We set the LAST PIECE OF TILE last night, around 10:30pm. I would have been done sooner, but I had to abandon the tile so I could focus on mudding so that Kat could get the walls primed and painted. One thing I did learn about mudding: it's not worth it! Hire it out to a professional. It literally took me 5 weeks to complete this task when I could have paid a crew $500 to do it in 3 days. This is the biggest reason why we are so behind. Anywhoo, I did save $500??




Sorry all these mugshots are of me. Kathy called me a camera hog last night. Hey, I wanted her to do the tile, but she told me she couldn't reach that high! Hah!




The tub made it thru the window, the vanities are in place, the shower is all tiled in, the toilet is set, the medicine cabinets are in and electrified, and the floors are grouted. We have a few vertical walls to grout in this weekend, then we'll seal up the tile and be done! Gotta tell you, the bathtub is AMAZING! We got the unit from Sansiro USA, and it runs as beautifully as it looks! Last night we had a major thunderstorm roll thru (about 1:30am). I had just finished my work for the night, so I filled up the tub, turned on the jets and the heater, grabbed a beer and soaked. I stayed for an hour. It was AWESOME! Many thanks to Bill from Sansiro for the best looking tub in any house in Aurora!

Carpet: We're getting carpet today. YEAH! I'll take some shots tonight and update the blog, or at least I'll try to update the blog!

Electrical: My sparky came out this week and got the place fired up. All the lights, all the switches, all the outlets -- up and hot. It's great. It felt nice to get rid off all of the extension cords and plug my tools into the new outlets. It's the fans and accent lights that make it all worth it, thought. They are GORGEOUS! They match the paint and stain perfectly and really make the fireplace POP to life! Honestly, though -- it's just nice to have lights in the space that aren't attached to a big fat orange cord.

Plumbing: My plumber was out this week too. He got most of the fixtures set and the bathtub up and running. He was not able to complete the sinks and toilet installs, so I will do this tomorrow (add some flex lines, putty in the drains, fire up the supply lines). The shower will have to wait another week or so, as I need to finish grouting in the tile and stones. He did get my fireplace up and running, which was a big sigh of relief! And he also helped me find a leak that we were having with the downstairs shower: the caulk around the soap dish is worn out, needs to be redone. YEA! Much cheaper than replacing pipes!

You know, I forgot to tell you a very important piece of information. We have had great weather for our project....and almost no injuries. But......I was playing softball Tuesday night and cracked a triple. I had to run pretty fast to beat the throw to third, but I knew I could beat the throw. However, I also knew I had to stay on base or be tagged out. So as I hit the bag, my foot stopped....but my body didn't. POP! A very loud pop was heard, not a snap, just a pop. But I was done. I had to get a replacement runner and I hobbled over to the bench, grabbed two cold beers (on for the ankle) and tried to nurse my wound. When the dust settled (we lost the game, but my replacement runner scored for me), I think the popping noise was my ankle tendon. Not sure what the technical name is for my injury, but it hurt like hell. I could not walk on my right foot Wednesday morning. But my buddy Jeff brought over a "miracle" splint, and once I wrapped my ankle in the splint I could walk around like normal, just couldn't fit a shoe on! So I took a sick from work, rested the ankle, and played gopher for my sparking and plumber. It worked out, but I've been working the past 3 days on a bummed ankle. It's fine, just can't put my weight on the right foot....gotta stand on my ladders and scaffolding with most the weight on my left leg and foot. And I got 'er done! And at least it happened at the END of the project, rather than during the framing portion!

What else? Kathy's having a dinner party this weekend, so our big push is to have the living room back in order, our clothes upstairs in our new closet, our bed upstairs tonight for our first night, and then start focusing on the final punch list. I'll have a ton of trim and loose ends to wrap up before I can call the project complete...but at least we'll be living in the space! And we're also going to turn our old bedroom into Jade's this weekend, and the kids are looking forward to having their own bedrooms finally!

Budget wise: we broke the budget back around the first of July! But I've managed to build the space for around $100/sf. This is considerably LOW for a construction project. And my bathroom along is a $200-225/sf space, so that's pretty amazing. I would project the space to cost a home owner around $150-175/sf to build using a contractor, so we're pretty happy about that savings. Still gotta find the extra $$ to pay for it, though!

What else? The family is doing well. I think everyone is ready for this construction project to be OVER! We're going camping next weekend, taking out the bullet, get some fishing in. Jade's back to school, and Kaleb starts Kindergarten on Monday. We should hear some news regarding the adoption in September....we'll keep you posted as things develop!

Looking forward to some good, very good rest tonight! Thank you so much for your support and interest. It's been a long and tiring project, but we're almost to the finish line!






Ciao!

Day 60

Two Months! Yikes! No wonder I'm so tired :-)

I'm going to keep this one short because it's late, I'm tired, and I want to go to bed!

We finished up the fireplace this weekend -- yeah! John (S.) came over and gave me a hand. Together we knocked out the final pieces of stone -- looks GREAT!!









Then John (B.) also stopped by on Sat. AND Sun. to help with his expertise: drywall finishing! He's an amazing worker and is just a great guy to have around.

Thanks to BOTH the Johns for helping out this weekend.

And Jeff! He came by so that we could crank out some more tile work. (Yuk, is it over yet?) We probably have one more full day of tiling plus some extra trim work left to do and then we can grout and call it quits. Yeah!

Anyways...hope all is well on your end...


NOTE TO NATE: Hope your trip is going well! Wanted to let you know that John (B.) was very impressed by your mudding skills in the stairway and had little touch up to do to get it ready for paint. Thank you SOOOOOOOOOO much! Also, wish you could have been there to finish up the fireplace...it looks AMAZING and I know you would have enjoyed! Like the cheap-O corbels?? Jeff told me to tell you that they "fit like a ....." oh, nevermind! Missing you on the drywalling of the vaulted ceiling! Hope Deutschland is treating you well! Don't forget the "Erdingers"!

Oh yeah...this shot was taken a month ago! Ouch! Where did it go?


"You remember the signal?"

Hello Again!

Well, sorry about the absence from blogging. Once we had received the green-light go from the building dep't. to finish our drywall, we began taping and mudding immediately. Since then I have been either too busy, too tired, or too lazy to update this blog. Truth is I have just been extremely, extremely busy and have just tonight forced myself to sit down and share with you our story since we last left off.

Rough Frame Complete. This allowed us to go forward with drywalling BOTH sides of the walls. This part of the project went pretty well. But when we hit taping and mudding, we hit a wall. It just commanded so much time that a few days turned into a few weeks. Looking back I wish I could have hired a crew to tape and mud...but we made it through.



Tiling. I got a pretty smoking deal from a local supplier for 18"x18" travertine tile. Travertine is a young version of marble. A bit more grainy, pocky, and soft. But it's GORGEOUS! Kat and I decided to use this for the floor (with accent dots) and the shower walls. Easy enough? I've never tiled, but fortunately Jeff, Nate, and I made it through the tough parts together and slammed out the shower and floor portions. All we have left to do are the walls in the bathroom, the ceiling of the shower, and the floor of the shower. Getting close!!

The bathroom is really tough to photograph without a wide lens. I'm going to get my buddy Paul out to really shoot the space well for us so that you can have a better sense of the tiles and patterns.

One of the tasks we had to do before tiling the shower was water-proofing the membrane. Since it's a steam shower, we had to make sure that water could not damage the structure. Here you see us applying the membrane. It went on pink and dried bright red.






Mudding. Did I tell you how much we hated mudding? Fortunately for us our good friends, John and John (not married) joined us for some help in getting the walls mudded. John is a near expert at mudding and proved to be a great help at teaching us how to mud. The other John is a dear friend and is always a pleasure to have around! Thanks to both of them!



Nicolette Sheridan stopped by the set one day to help us mud. That was pretty cool! She's a great mudder....and fun to work with!

Painting. Kathy has been doing a wonderful job of painting the spaces (I HATE PAINTING!) She's been spending her free afternoons knocking out the spaces that we've completed the mudding and sanding in by painting 2 primer coats and a finish color. Thank you! Here she is placing the ceremonious last dot on the floor! Sorry Kat -- I owe you a picture here for the posting!




Fireplace. DIY came out to shoot us laying up the fireplace stone. It went a bit slow, but we got-er-done. It looked beautiful. Then Nate and I were working on getting the wood mantel in place and walked away for a brief second: CRASH! Oh, it hurt!! The 7' long wood beam crashed down upon the hearth, destroying one of the 19"x20" stones and ripping off about 1/3 of the stone that we had meticulously lain that day. There are really no words that can describe how I felt.....well, maybe one word. Anyways, I just left. Then tonight after our softball game, Kat and I came back and restored the work. Pretty sharp little fireplace unit!

That's about it for now. Nate leaves on Friday. So Kat and I (and sometimes Jeff) are left to wrap up the space ourselves. Stupid drywall! We should be far enough along in about 3 weeks to be able to move in and start living in the space, unfinished.






Well, it's late and I have an early morning appointment. Good night my friends!