Yellowhead Centre upgrades on time and on budget
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- Published on Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Before.
After.
By Eoin Devereux
Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press
After months of work, the first phase of upgrades to the Yellowhead Centre (YHC) in Neepawa have been completed. The $100,000 worth of improvements to the community owned and operated facility included the installation of new LED lighting, a de-humidifier, low-E ceiling, the painting of the arena seating and readjustment of the heating system. Yellowhead Centre director of operations Anne Kuharski said that it’s great to see how quickly this work was able to progress.
“Everything was completed on schedule. There were two summer students, Katie Kidd and Robyn Birch, who did 99 per cent of the painting and they did an amazing job,” said Kuharski. “The heaters have also been repositioned within the arena. With the installation of the low-E ceiling in the arena, the heaters needed to be lowered in order to meet the code requirements of having the heaters 24 inches away from the ceiling. This will actually make it warmer in the stands during events, because the heaters are lower and angled more directly towards the seats and away from the ice surface. With all that work now finalized, we can start getting ready to install the ice and look ahead to another season.”
The lowering of the heaters was completed earlier this week, while the lighting, new ceiling and dehumidifier were finished in June. Those jobs were done by John’s Electric of Neepawa and Cimco Refrigeration of Winnipeg respectively.
This project, while in the deliberation stage for quite some time, finally gained traction in January, when the Yellowhead Centre board passed a motion to upgrade the arena and the hall in a tiered renovation effort.
The money for the renovations to the Yellowhead Centre was assembled from a combination of spending from the facility’s accumulated reserved fund, as well as an array of grants from several local organizations. Additional improvements to the arena and Yellowhead Hall are on the to-do list, but an exact schedule for that work to go forward is not currently in place.
As for the recently completed renovations, Kuharski noted that since the vast majority of the community has not yet seen these upgrades, she is looking forward to hearing exactly what the first impressions will be from people, come fall.
“We’re excited to see the season start and just what the public thinks about all this work that’s gone into the facility,” Kuharski stated. “I think it looks great. To see how much brighter it is out there, with the new lighting and the paint job, it’s very satisfying to see. There’s a lot of behind the scenes improvements that are done of a regular basis. If you do a furnace or a water heater, nobody notices, but with something that’s visual like this and that everybody can appreciate, that’s a good feeling.”
Photos by Eoin Devereux. Robyn Birch (left) and Katie Kidd spent countless hours scraping away the old red paint and applying the fresh silverish grey colour, which will better reflect light, allowing for the arena to be much brighter than it was previously.
