Celebrating our beautiful clubhouse and the memories we’ve made.
GRANITE GOLF CLUB GRANITE GOLF CLUB
COMMUNITY COMMUNITY
There is nothing I enjoy more than harkening back to the old days at the Club and waxing poetic about my younger years. The tough part is everything was ‘a couple of years ago’ Bunker renovations? Yeah, that was a couple of years ago. Paving the entrance road? A couple of years ago. 2010? A couple of years ago The Clubhouse, it’s brand new, it’s only a couple of years old, right? Wrong. We are, almost to the day, celebrating the Clubhouse at Granite Golf Club’s 20th anniversary Memories are a funny thing especially when you have spent almost half of your life in the same place, I’ll let you do the math on that one
When the Club opened in July of 2000, mind you it was only 9 holes to start, all we had was a golf course. The entrance road was a dusty gravel mess, your food and beverage options were sandwiches that were assembled every morning at the Granite Club and transported up the 404 (there was no 407 option in those days) or a hot dog from the grill. Our clubhouse was an interesting William Scotsman double wide trailer, held together by duct tape and dreams… but, mostly duct tape. The golf course was beautiful but I think I can safely say that the clubhouse provided some serious opportunities for improvement. Early on in my tenure with the Club, Granite Golf began doing what Granite Golf does best, asking what’s next?
The obvious answer was to build a clubhouse to match the course and more importantly the membership. Understated, elegant, welcoming, and exclusive. There was never a need or a desire for grand ballrooms for weddings or massive reception areas for banquets. This was a golfers’ club and the clubhouse needed to be a comfortable refuge for our weary members to enjoy a hot shower and a cold libation after a sweltering round.
With everything at Granite, excellence never comes easy, if it did it wouldn’t be excellent. Turning ideas and dreams into reality is easier said than done, and time heals all wounds but my goodness, the daily drama behind the scenes is still fresh in my mind.
In late 2002 the club began the process of securing designers, architects, consultants, and engineers. Our bucolic location on the Oak Ridge Moraine added a layer of complexity It wasn’t as easy as tapping into town water and city sewer lines, mainly because there wasn’t anything to tap into. Before a shovel went into the ground we needed to secure permitting from the township and cross our fingers that the folks at the TRCA and the Ministry of the Environment blessed us with the approvals needed to move forward. None of this would have been possible without the engineers at Dillon Consulting and Ron Shishido who moved heaven and earth to get the clubhouse plans on track.
There are too many stories from this period in the Club’s history to recount all of them, however a few that stick out are the search for water and an 11th hour gas line break that almost delayed the grand opening. I will start with the latter.
The afternoon before the soft opening of the Clubhouse in late June 2004 almost didn’t happen. In our rush to button up all of the last minute details, including the removal of the aforementioned William Scottsman trailer, a seemingly routine irrigation repair nicked an underground natural gas line that serviced the new clubhouse. To pile on we were waiting on the final occupancy inspection that was critical to opening the doors to the long awaited and highly anticipated new clubhouse
Now when I say 11th hour I am not being hyperbolic, this literally happened 18 hours before the grand reveal. Needless to say, after a panicked phone call to Enbridge Gas and the local authorities (yes there were fire trucks involved) we were able to get the line repaired and service to the clubhouse restored minutes before the inspector arrived to give us the green light to occupy our brand new clubhouse. I should add that this was one of the few times I witnessed the usually cool John Gravett get hot under the collar and to this day there is a cloud of profanity that still lingers somewhere over the red barn.
The other story that sticks in my mind was the search for water. As previously mentioned, Granite Golf is on the Durham Region side of the road. What this means is that we are protected, at least for the foreseeable future, from commercial and residential development.
The downside is that we are on our own as we do not enjoy the comforts of town water and sewage lines. This means that we have to supply and treat our own water and waste The mission ahead of us at the time was to drill a well that produced enough water to service the needs of our clubhouse.
Neverthat EASYORSIMPLE
At the planning stage this was a minor footnote both to the project as well as the budget. We were located on an ancient glacial till, the Oak Ridge Moraine We are literally sitting on one of, if not the most abundant sources of subsurface groundwater reserves on the planet. We are located on an aquifer! All we have to do is dig a well and we will hit water, easy right? Wrong. What we quickly learned is that yes, every time we dug a water well we did in fact hit water however, not all wells are created equal. The local, Provincial, Federal authorities along the army of engineers strict criteria that need be met in order to approval to draw from earth. Long story shorter 10 ‘dusters’, as the well d called it, and month monitoring, we finally gold and found our fo wellhead, 286 feet deep, the right of #11 gree bunkers. What was supp to be a one day minor a of the clubhouse p ended up taking 6 month tens of thousands more d to complete.
Our clubhouse at Granite has served us well over the last 20-years. It has been home to grand celebrations and special moments. Its construction was a huge accomplishment for a little member-owned club north of the city and remains the heart of who we are and all we do as a close-knit Granite Golf Club community.
