Wilf’s re-opening further delayed

The first Wilf’s Tuesday of 2012 will have to wait at least another week.

The Wilfrid Laurier University Students’ Union (WLUSU) announced Tuesday that the campus bar, which has been closed since late October after a sewage flood, is still not ready to re-open. At the outset of the winter semester, Wilf’s was scheduled to re-open Jan. 24, however, delays in the repairs pushed the date back to next week at the earliest.

“We have a fully operational kitchen space, but the dining room and bar area are not yet complete enough to safely permit customers to use the room,” said WLUSU general manager Mike McMahon.

Wilf’s was forced to shut down over the Halloween weekend when the drains in the kitchen and washrooms backed up and the campus bar flooded. Almost the entire restaurant was affected, and several pieces of furniture and a large potion of the flooring in the dining room needed to be replaced.

The Jan. 24 re-opening date was given to WLUSU by the construction company doing the repairs. However the bar area remains impossible to operate because sinks and tables that need to be custom made for the area have yet to arrive.

“The original tables for the bar that were destroyed by the sewage, they were custom and so now to get a replacement of a custom product, you’re a little beholden to the job shop that creates them,” he said.

“We were asking them to create our custom goods over the holiday season. So that certainly has an impact. You just get in line and when the line stops for the holiday season you just wait.”

According to McMahon, all the remaining pieces needed to complete the re-construction in Wilf’s will be on campus by Friday.

When it comes to a new re-opening date, McMahon hopes that Wilf’s won’t miss out on another Tuesday night, which he calls “the highlight of the week.”

“We don’t want to be delayed for any more than a single Tuesday,” said McMahon.

“We wanted to make sure that we got things rolling for next week as an initial plan.”

According to McMahon, until it can re-open, Wilf’s is offering “nice surprises,” the first of which came Tuesday afternoon when the campus bar offered free Seagram Wraps.