Apr 20, 2008

Mother, daughters build business to keep family closeBy David GunterBonnerCountyDailyBee.com

Bonners Ferry – Soon after her family moved across the border from Montana, Shelly Yount peeped through the windows of Lindsay-Helmer Hardware and got hooked on the downtown building.

Just a girl at the time, she found everything about the place captivating. Wooden shelves ran nearly to the ceiling along the north wall – a perfect symmetry of rectangular storage spaces – with an attached ladder that could be rolled down their length, from a few feet inside the front door all the way back to the steps of the mezzanine.

Plank floors creaked pleasantly underfoot and the pulleys on the old hand-operated elevator made music as goods were transferred from floor-to-floor.

A generation later, the building she fell in love with remains virtually unchanged, except for the fact that its original shelves are now stocked with eclectic gifts and a popular lunchtime bistro draws a daily crowd to the back of the store for homemade meals.

This new incarnation, called Under the Sun, opened two years ago, soon after Yount and her husband watched the youngest of their three daughters graduate from high school. By that time, the hardware building had been sitting empty for more than seven years. It found new life when Kaylan, Kendall and Kynsie Yount – three attractive, intelligent young women in their early 20s – expressed a desire to keep family roots planted in Bonners Ferry.

“It’s all been fate,” Shelly Yount said. “The girls all wanted to stay in town, so the idea started building and we started thinking: What would be good for their future? What could we all do together?”

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