After months of pouring footings and foundations at Promega’s distribution and logistics facility, the Kepler Center Expansion is starting to take shape with structural steel under way, along with the mezzanine and metal roof decking. The Kepler Center, originally finished in Fall of 2015, was designed and built for future expansion. On the heels of recent major growth, Promega finalized their expansion plans, which resulted in a 196,500 square foot expansion to the existing 126,500 square foot building.  Once complete, the project will total nearly 323,000 square feet or nearly 7.5 acres of floor space! The new expansion includes additional Vertical Lift Modules (VLM’s), a large freezer farm room, and an enormous warehouse space for fixed and mobile high bay racking systems.  This expansion will allow Promega to continue with their growing product lines of kit assembling, packaging, and shipping internationally and domestically.

The latest Kraemer Development project, Woodland Crest, consists of the construction of a new multi-tenant commercial building and a 2nd commercial building for a single tenant along with the development of a multi-lot site located in Waunakee, Wisconsin. A future phase of this project will consist of a third commercial building.

The exterior envelope includes a combination of brick, stone, cast stone sills & copings, siding, and aluminum storefront windows & entries. Construction will start April 2021 with scheduled completion to be November 2021.

We mentioned St. Andrew Westside School in last month’s Chalk Lines as being one of the upcoming groundbreaking ceremonies taking place this month. Wonewoc Schools is also making plans for their March groundbreaking some time in the middle of the month – weather permitting.

After passing a referendum in the spring of 2020, the Wonewoc School project will begin the first part of March 2021 and finish up this summer before the new school year commences. The projects funded by the referendum will include security and safety upgrades to the existing school and a new addition and renovation of the career and technology teaching spaces which include the wood shop, machine shop and agricultural sciences. Also taking place will be renovations of the middle and high school science labs and classrooms, an expansion of the cafeteria, a new building-wide air conditioning system, and ADA accessibility improvements.

Kraemer Brothers will be working on an Audi dealership in Kirkwood, MO that consists of demolishing the majority of the existing car dealership, shoring up a portion of the existing roof structure, and building a new 25,810 square foot, two-story Audi Dealership in its place. The rendering above gives an idea of the scope of the project.

In addition to the Promega RFC, Nobel Drive, BTC 2C and Covance projects carrying over to spring 2021, Westside Christian School has scheduled their groundbreaking for the first week of March. This project will include a 8,900 square foot addition to add 6 classrooms to the existing Westside Christian School in Middleton, Wisconsin. With the school’s participation in the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, some families preferring face-to-face instruction instead of virtual, and steady growth in K-8 students over the past 4 years, the school has reached its capacity. Last year, they had 40 students on a waiting list and had to turn away 40+ additional inquiries. As stated in their RFP to Kraemer Brothers, “We could have filled another entire Kindergarten classroom if we had the space.”

One of the new class-rooms will be dedicated to science and art and a smart board with speakers is planned for each classroom. Along with the new addition, the parking lot will be resurfaced, 100 lockers added, and necessary improvements will be made to the church and offices as well.

RAHS received quite the Christmas present this year. The wrestling mats are on the second floor, the Reedsburg High School Beaver’s colors are on the walls, and the athletic equipment is in place. The Reedsburg High School Athletic Building is complete and ready for the students to use after they come back from Christmas break. This addition to the existing high school was started in June and completed in just 7 months. The fitness facility will provide roughly 5,000 square feet of space — about the size of a small gymnasium. The second floor is a multipurpose room of the same size that will be used for a variety of sports and uses, including wrestling practice, track practice and workout space for physical education classes.“ One of the huge driving forces behind it was to be able to expand our phys ed curriculum, to provide more facilities for health and wellness and strength and conditioning for our phys ed classes,” said Reedsburg Area High School Athletic Director Bryan Yager.

If it can’t be spring yet, we can at least take a glimpse at what is coming down the pike for Spring 2021 Kraemer Brothers’ projects.

After a short period of being “on hold”, Kraemer Developments latest project for Woodland Crest will be making a debut in early spring. It will be a 30,000 sq. ft. mixed-use development with a Fast & Fresh convenience store, multi-tenant retail buildings and restaurant space, multi-family buildings, a senior living complex, and four single family lots. Weldcorp’s industrial building renovations in DeForest will also commence about that time as will the Wonewoc School renovations. Work will continue at the Promega campus into 2021 with the expansion of the Kepler Center, the on-going BTC renovations, the Noble Drive renovations and expansion and the RDC & RFC renovations. One project heading for completion in late spring is Promega CMC.

Kraemer Brothers was recognized on February 9th at the Associated Builders & Contractors (ABC) of Wisconsin Projects of Distinction Awards Banquet. This year, we received awards for the following five projects: Platteville Schools, St. Cecilia Catholic Church, Wind River Financial, Milwaukee Home2 Suites and Liberty AC Hotel by Marriott. Congratulations to all involved in our winning projects, as well as all other project award winners that shared the evening with us!

Fairway Independent Mortgage’s new office building has proven to be a unique project, from the architectural design of the building and the location, to the involvement of the firm’s team members throughout the construction process.

Recently, three members of Fairway Independent Mortgage took part in setting the final steel beams on the third floor of the structure. On November 17th, Fairway employees put on their hard hats and strapped into harnesses with the help of Kraemer Brothers’ onsite crew. The members were courageous enough to ride a manlift and even helped signal to the crane operator. This fun experience was also a first for Kraemer Brothers, in that a GoPro camera was mounted to the steel beam to capture unique footage of the event. Kraemer Brothers onsite team had come up with the idea to use a GoPro and Kraemer Brothers marketing team thought the experiment would be beneficial, with potential for opportunities on many other project sites.

When completed in October 2017 Fairway’s new headquarters will be three stories tall and total 96,000 square feet.