WAUPUN — Wind and Unwined reopened Monday after temporarily closing to deal with “extensive damage” dealt by a burst water line over a below-zero weekend.
While the cafe itself is now open, the lounge will be closed until repairs can be completed.
Wind and Unwined originally broke the news about the damage on their Facebook page on January 15th, announcing they would be “indefinitely closing” the kitchen and lounge until the damage could be repaired.
“Unfortunately, we had an issue with our water lines over the weekend which has resulted in extensive damage,” the post said. “We are working as quickly as we can to fix the damages and reopen our kitchen and lounge as soon as possible.”
Over the next two weeks the cafe posted several updates, but made the decision to close the entire cafe for a week to work on repairs. On the 28th they finally announced they were reopening the cafe side of the restaurant.
As for the damage, it completely ruined the flooring in the lounge and some kitchen equipment, and will take much longer to completely repair.
“We had a geyser water spring for about 12 hours straight that we didn’t catch because we had staff leave on Thursday and we didn’t come back until the following week, so it had gone for a while,” Brooke said.
When the pipe break occurred, the owners—Brooke Straks and Jeff Collien—were in Florida on holiday with family and couldn’t be personally there to oversee the repairs.
“Being that we were in Florida and I could not get here to take care of things, we contacted Derek at Tru Cleaners and he assured us that he was going to keep it under control and to try to enjoy our vacation so he took and he spearheaded it along with my brother Jaden and my daughter Kayleigh,” she said. “Had they all not been here and helped to get things under control and get things ripped up and get things moved out so people could start getting the flooring out, we would have been delayed even longer so huge.”
Sadly, the damage was done.
“All of our 100 plus year old original hardwood floors that we worked super hard to restore was destroyed. We had to tear everything down to the bones, and even once we took the flooring out, we found that some of the actual studs and things underneath had to be taken out too. So it’s just been like, a full rebuild all on like the floors.”
“When you walk in here [the lounge], it feels like we lost like the last nine months because we’re right back where we started, but we’re lucky in that it could have been worse,” she said. “We’re lucky that that side [the cafe] didn’t get damaged because if we had to pull out all of the flooring from that side too it would have been just terrible.”
They were originally hoping to replace the lost flooring with historic flooring from other dismantled buildings from the time period, but it is unlikely to happen due to the high costs of authentic old wood.
They have ordered replacement flooring on order from Werner Harmsen which should be arriving within the next few weeks.
“We’re lucky that yesterday we were able to reopen that side [the cafe] since we got the kitchen completely finished over the weekend,” Brooke said. “So we’re super excited to reopen partially and we’re hoping our goal is to get this done soon, so we can still be open for IceFest because we’re a warming shelter and have live music and some fun things planned for that.”
Over the last several months they’ve been ramping up use for the lounge section, which provided a popular venue for “vinyl nights” and other events, as well as a relaxing lounge for visitors. Once repairs are complete on the lounge it is expected everything will return as it was before.
And despite the tragedy that hit this month, not all has been bad for the cafe.
“There is so much support that we’ve experienced from people in the community, the amount of messages and phone calls, and offers to help and just kind of pep talks—just the unbelievable support that our community always shows to small business,” Brooke said. “So we just wanted to thank our community for all of their support and their patience, and we’re just excited to welcome everybody back into our space and get back to where we were.”
Wind and Unwined will post more updates as they complete the repairs over the next several weeks.
