Well after owning our land for two years, meeting with four different builders (one that we try not to talk about) and spending countless hours researching house plans, we finally have a driveway. WhooHoo!

I’ll have some pictures of the driveway up soon. I plan to get out there today and take some photos of it.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that digging the basement is at a standstill due to a ground water issue. What is the issue you wonder? About seven feet deep in the ground we hit a lot of water. Yikes. Now this is not necessarily a reason to panic because the house can be built up higher and they can pack in dirt around the house to help protect from the water and run it off.  We are also having a very good drainage and water-proofing system installed. Water however, is always a scary thing.

Plan B is to move the house to the back of the property where there is a small area of higher ground.  There will still be ground water to deal with but we will be naturally higher because of how the land has a natural mound there. (Fun Fact: This mound is actually a shale deposit left over from a glacier. Pretty interesting, huh?)

We are going to discuss this further with the builder today and make our decision.  We’d like to stay where we are because it will give us a nice big backyard and help maintain some privacy since we won’t be right next to the neighbor.  But…there’s the water to consider and the longterm protection of our basement from water is definitely the number one concern right now.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to this story…

They’re going to be digging a hole on Monday and  starting the driveway next week! Yea! The house is now staked out on the land. We’re going to visit this weekend and see what it looks like. We’ll post some pictures as soon as we take them.

Well, after going back and forth and back and forth…and then around in a circle and back and forth again, we decided on our exterior selections for the new house. Yay for us!

The brick and siding choices were (hopefully) the most difficult choices we will have to make with the house. The exterior is so important because that’s the first thing everyone will see when they pull in the driveway and we can’t have you all gasping in horror as you pull in because our house is hideous.

The first real challenge was deciding on a brick. I never realized just how many different styles and colors of bricks really existed until now. It was mind-numbing to stare at a wall of brick samples and then try to picture it on our house. Luckily Dan “the brick guy” at Ideal Builders Supply was able to give us addresses for houses with the brick we were looking at so we could drive by and look at them in all of their glory.

Finally we decided on the Hamilton Blend brick by Belden Brick for our brick. It’s a brown brick (or “biscuit” as Dan “the brick guy” called it) with a light gray-silver wash over it. Overall it should appear gray with some light brown showing through.

Once we had the brick picked out it was time for the siding. The siding wasn’t quite as difficult as the brick (because there are less colors) but it still posed a bit of a challenge. We compared mock-ups of our house with the brick and various siding colors. Finally we decided on a Natural Linen color, which is a very pale tan/cream. That color didn’t last long however, because what we really wanted was gray siding from the beginning so we changed our selection and went with Platinum Gray for our siding color.

The trim, gutters and downspouts will all be white. That was a fairly easy decision.

The front door will be a really cool door that will appear to be made from wood planks and the garage door will be a carriage door style complete with metal handles.

Even with all the mock-ups we did, all the research, the comparisons and everything else that went into these selections, we still had to just trust that we were making the right decisions and that once our house is built we can stand back and say, “Yep, those exterior selections were perfect.”

Hey Everybody,

I’d just like to welcome you to our new website: the Zimmerman Project

Here we will keep everyone updated on the progress of our new house as we begin the building process. So far, as you can see from the photo gallery, we only have a field so far. In the weeks and months to come however, you’ll get to see that empty field transform as we build our new house ( or what I like to refer to as “My Castle”).

So keep coming back because I’m sure things will be changing pretty quickly.