September 2003 – After two
years of planning and countless meetings of the Long Range Planning Committee, Finance Committee and Board, our membership approved
a $13 million renovation plan for the clubhouse and golf course with 92% of the
members voting in favor. Now what?
Many of the "plumbing
problems" in the old clubhouse were due to the high mineral content of our
potable well water. The Village of Northfield
was approached about a possible annexation from unincorporated Cook County
into the Village which would give us access to their water supply. After much negotiation between the Village,
the Club’s Board and our respective legal counsel, a deal was struck and the
Club was annexed into the Village that fall.
Initial renovation plans
called for most of the clubhouse to close January 1, 2004 and reopen Memorial Day of
2005. The men’s and ladies’ locker rooms
would remain open for much of the construction.
One bar, located in the men’s locker room, would also remain open. Platform tennis and skeet programs would
operate as usual that winter. We also
planned to keep the tennis courts, pool and pool snack bar operational that
summer. The golf course renovations
would begin in July of 2004 and be completed in time for the following
season. We would try to pack a year’s
worth of golf events into the front half of a construction shortened
season. Food service for all these
events, and daily lunch service in the one remaining bar area, would need to be
produced from our pool snack bar kitchen.
I don’t know what your pool snack bar is like, but this sounds much
easier than it actually is. Ours was not
equipped to provide food for an entire club.
A portable grill was purchased to supplement the equipment in the pool
snack bar.
October, November and
December were spent planning for the shutdown of the majority of the clubhouse
in January of 2004. We would have only
six short weeks to move out of the clubhouse and have the much of the building
ready to be demolished by mid February.
Temporary administrative offices had to be located and wired, off site
storage arranged for all the items we wished to keep and salvage contractors
arranged for items we didn’t. Coolers,
freezers and ice machines were moved to our cart storage area to provide the
refrigeration and ice we would need to keep some portions of our food service
operational. We needed all six weeks to
move out and prepare for the demolition.
Thankfully, we had told
prospective parties we may not have a clubhouse in 2004, so all our banquet
bookings were on a tentative basis.
Other clubs in the area were contacted and we requested dining
reciprocity for our members during our construction. I’m grateful to the boards and managers of
the thirteen clubs that agreed to open their clubs to our membership. Our members could continue to receive the
"private club experience" during the fifteen months it would take to build a
new clubhouse.
Certainly, one of the most
difficult decisions of the entire renovation project was what would happen to
our loyal staff, many who had worked at the Club a decade or more? The project "downtime" budget could not support
normal payroll and many of the clubhouse employees would have to be laid
off. Some employees could be shifted
around to areas that would remain operational and some would be called back to
work the pool snack bar and golf events that summer. The Board approved a severance package for
the staff that would be laid off, giving them one week’s pay for each year of
service to the Club. To receive this
severance, employees would need to work through the end of December, when the
clubhouse would close.
Demolition began as scheduled
in February of 2004 and most of the old clubhouse was reduced to a large pile
of rubble in two short weeks. Demolition
and site preparation would continue into May.
Almost immediately plan changes and project scope additions began to
occur. Sewer lines were not in the
condition we had hoped they’d be and the decision to replace them was a
necessary one. This would be one of the
first of 130 project change orders/scope additions to occur over the course of
the clubhouse construction.
One of the other major
decisions made along the way was to kill our current golf greens and reseed
them as part of the course renovations.
Since this was not part of the project scope that the membership had
approved earlier, and would require the closing of the entire golf course,
another membership vote was required.
Letters were written and presentations were made extolling the benefits
of doing this now, while the course is already disrupted. The vote to reseed our greens and close the
golf course was overwhelmingly approved by the membership, with only two
dissenting votes cast. I’m indebted to
the seventeen clubs that stepped up to the plate and offered golf reciprocity
to our members. The impact of closing
our golf course was lessened tremendously due to the generosity of these clubs.
The
largest project change was adding the renovation of the men’s locker room and
bar area to the project scope. This
would push the project budget to almost $15 million, two million over the
original $13 million budget. The entire
project, less the added scope, was completed on budget and was finished ahead
of schedule.
We reopened our clubhouse on
April 6th and the golf course reopened on May 28th of
this year. The membership absolutely
loves the results of the renovations and we now have a facility we can all be
very proud of. I was blessed with a
Board member that was assigned to oversee the project that has great knowledge
of the construction trades and a Club President that was willing to make some
tough decisions quickly. Without the
efforts of these two gentlemen, and all the members involved on the various
Club and Board committees, completing the project successfully would have been
nearly impossible.
I
would certainly never call what we did at our Club as being "easy", it was
not. I lost many hours of sleep fretting
over the many details of the planning and construction. And while the word "fun" never really entered
my mind during the construction phase, it has been fun seeing the members enjoy
the new facilities since we reopened. It
has made the two plus years of planning, the 130 design/construction meetings
I’ve attended, and last year and half of construction a worthwhile
experience. Now I get to start again
because the membership would like a new pool for next summer.
Part Three: Isn’t there supposed to be an outlet there? and, You want to put the thermostat where?
Tell Us What You Think!
You must be logged in to post a comment.