Dining Room gets facelift

While students and professors enjoyed time off from classes during spring break, sounds of construction filled the Maxwell Student Union Dining Hall. The end product that students came back to was a completely renovated Hoke Dining Room.

The Hoke Dining Room, located to the left of the cash register in the MSU Dining Hall, received a total facelift from floor to ceiling to make it more appealing. According to Auxiliary Services Executive Director Kyle Cullars, the renovations cost around $15,000.

“Hoke Dining room had gotten in pretty bad shape; the ceiling grid was filthy and old, and the wall still had carpet on (it),” Cullars said. “The room was just in really bad shape and it needed just a cosmetic facelift.”

Since the old pull-down screen and curtains are gone, more sunlight can now filter into the dining room. The room also now boasts a fresh coat of white paint on its walls.

“It’s very bright which is what we wanted, but it’s also somewhat cold because we don’t have anything on the wall,” Cullars said. “It’d be nice to see some décor on the wall just to soften up the wall a little bit.”

Some students agree with Cullars that the renovations are nice, but missing some color.

“(The dining room) is fancy, but plain and white,” said sophomore math major Lauren Tripi. “They need to decorate.”

Teena Hulsey, who works at the cash register in the dining hall, thinks the renovations are nice.

“I think it’s a lot better and a lot better atmosphere,” Hulsey said.

Hulsey said more students have been sitting in the Hoke Dining Room since the renovations.

“If it’s reserved or something they get disappointed,” she said.

The Hoke Dining Room renovations coincided with the arrival of new furniture for the University Banquet Room, in the back of the MSU Dining Hall, allowing the reuse of furniture already available.

“We had those huge wooden tables and large chairs in the banquet room and we needed to replace those because they weren’t as functional as we needed in the banquet room,” Cullars said. “Since we were going to replace that furniture over spring break I thought . we can use nine or 10 of those tables and the chairs that go with it from the banquet room for the next year.”

The university will be receiving eight outdoor metal tables and chairs to go on the balcony outside Hoke Dining Room so that students can enjoy the outdoor weather while eating.

Auxiliary Services still plans to renovate the entire MSU Dining Hall next year.

“We’ve got some tentative drawings done,” Cullars said. “Basically we’re going to gut the main dining room, Hoke Dining Room, and the whole serving area; basically everything from the kitchen out is going to be redone.”

The renovations will set the dining area up so that serving stations are throughout the dining room with seating in between. The same food lines available now will remain.

The number of seats available will increase slightly due to the new variety of tables.

“We’re going have a good mix with booths, tables, different size tables. The main table size we’ll use will be a four-person square table so you can pull it together and make it as big as you need,” Cullars said. “Right now if you have an eight-person table and only have two people eating, it’s not likely someone that doesn’t know those people is going to sit down with them.”

According to Cullars, the renovations are expected to begin in May of 2011 and be completed by the end of June. The total cost of the renovations is estimated to be around $3 million.

“It should be a very, very nice renovation,” Cullars said.

Posted by Matt Chambers on Apr 9 2010. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry