Construction of the new clubhouse at the Minnewasta Golf and Country Club is progressing nicely, putting the building on track to open this fall.
After some initial delays with the project, favourable weather over the winter has helped work to keep pace, head pro and general manager Greg Hesom said last week.
“We’re moving along now, and I would imagine September or October we will be finished, and it is starting to look beautiful,” he said. “It is looking like we have envisioned.
“I think we have to remember it’s a big building. It’s a very customized building, so it’s not cookie cutter … and we did have some delays right at the beginning of the project. When you start digging, you always find stuff you didn’t expect to find underneath, so we had to work around that,” Hesom said. “If we get finished by September or October, a 16-month build on a building of this scale in our area is actually a pretty quick build.”
A fire destroyed the old restaurant and clubhouse in late 2021. Minnewasta worked with LM Architectural Group of Winnipeg on the design and plans for the new facility being built by Triple E Developments.
There were a couple key elements that became a focus with the design, including capitalizing on the view of the course. There will also be a section of the patio area that will be raised to serve as a stage, as they hope to bring back special events like the Friday Night Lights concerts.
The hope is also to have the restaurant be a year-round facility operated by Santa Lucia. There will also be golf simulators to help attract people in the off-season.
The priority early on was to get the roof up and windows in so that the building was sealed to allow the interior work to get started, noted Hesom.
“Lots of the door framing is finished, and electrical is busy, plumbing is busy, and lots of mechanical stuff is already in the basement,” he said. “They’ll continue to work away at all of that … you can’t see progress from the outside, but you know how much is going on in the inside.
“There’s lots of traffic that comes driving by to check it out on a daily basis. I think we’ll really get a good sense of the excitement once the golf season starts and we’ve got people here on a daily basis and visitors coming from outside the city who haven’t seen it or haven’t looked at it on a daily basis.”
Minnewasta was working from a funding base of about $3 million through insurance coverage, and the fundraising campaign has so far brought in $1.4 million, including a $300,000 grant from the province, but Hesom said the final overall price tag is not entirely set in stone.
“It’s a bit of a moving target whenever you have a project of this size, but we’re where we expected to be,” he said, estimating the building itself is around $5.5 million, but there is then all of the extras including extensive landscaping and patio space as well as all of the furnishings, media components, kitchen, and golf simulator rooms.
“All of that stuff adds up on top of the actual building project,” Hesom said. “We’ll still be under the $7 million mark by the end of the day … we have all of the financing in place for what we don’t have from insurance and raised money.
“We’ll continue over the next number of years with fundraising as much as we can,” he added, emphasizing how much this building will be a benefit to Morden and the surrounding area.
“I think we are building a fantastic asset for the city of Morden … we are really excited about what this will do for the community,” Hesom said, noting how often the club hosts significant fundraising events. “That’s a half million dollars a year flowing straight back into a lot of social needs in the city … it is coming through the course, and it is a continuous flow of funds, which I think is really important.”
