Renovating Your Club is Fun and Easy! Part Two – Put on the Hard Hat

by Jim Petersen, CCM, General Manager, Sunset Ridge CC, Northfield, Ill. (editor@clubandresortbusiness.com)
January 2008
 

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 6^th and the golf course reopened on May 28^th 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?

Click here to Read Part One

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