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We have, for my husband and I, the opportunity of a lifetime. I have been a Home Depot department supervisor for 13 years in Portland Oregon. An opportunity has opened up for me to become an ASM, Assistant Store Manager, if I transfer to an Idaho store, which is a dream come true. So far, I have visited the Sandpoint and Coeur D A'lene Home Depots. I loved the Sandpoint store. The fresh air and that mountain situated behind the store was like a Norman Rockwell painting for a Home Depot lifer like myself. The Coeur D A'lene Home Depot was like a Portland Oregon store! The parking lot was like a demolition derby as I swerved around trying to avoid speeding cars and uncorralled shopping carts in the clearly overcrowded parking lot.
We are planning to visit more stores in two weeks during my vacation. On my list are the five Boise area stores, two in Boise, Eagle, Nampa, and Meridian. Then, there are Pocatello, Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, and Lewiston.
Our main need is good-excellent health care for my disabled husband. For wants, an area with low crime, and a home on small acreage-not more than ten. A buddy of mine in Star will put us up for the week while we look.
Any ideas of where we should definitely look and also areas to avoid will be greatly appreciated. And of course, any Home Depot store experiences, positive or negative.
Sandpoint is gorgeous. Lots of snow, which will be new to you since you are from Portland. Living wage jobs are hard to come by, but you are bringing your job with you. You might be able to buy the small acreage you want without too long a commute to work.
CDA is a lot more expensive and a 5 acre parcel can be hard to come by and is expensive. The Home Depot parking lot can be a zoo, as bad as the Costco parking lot, but overall traffic in CDA is much easier than in Portland. There is a much higher chance of specialty medical, especially since Spokane is close enough for trips to nedical.
Best medical will be in Boise. Someone else will answer questions about Boise.
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Last edited by volosong; 04-03-2018 at 08:59 AM..
Reason: off topic comment, not the thread for discussion of political philosophy
We live outside Sandpoint in Sagle. I agree completely with your characterization of the two Home Depot stores in Ponderay and CdA. I much prefer shopping at the Ponderay store.
It sounds to me like your medical needs may end up driving the decision. I don't know if your husband requires some sort of specialty medical care, but if he does I would specifically look to see whether what he needs is available in the various locations under consideration.
There is reasonably good medical care available in Sandpoint for fairly routine issues, but for specialty care you may find you need to head down to CdA. That's not too bad if it's an once in a while event, but if you needed access to that care on a regular basis it would get old IMO. You never know though, you may find just what you need in the Sandpoint medical community.
Kootenai Regional Medical Center in CdA is the largest hospital in north Idaho, and there is a good sized network of medical providers in that area. My wife is having a hip replacement later this month, so we've been looking at hospital statistics and reviews. We were surprised to find that Kootenai Regional has better health outcomes than the hospitals in Spokane, particularly lower infection rates, which is the primary risk in joint replacement surgeries.
Just as a side note, she is having her surgery done at Northwest Specialty Hospital in Post Falls, which has even better outcomes for this sort of surgery than Kootenai Regional.
No doubt the Boise area will have the strongest network of medical providers in the state, but I'll let someone who lives there chime in with any details.
I am retired, and we plan to live here for the rest of our lives. Availability of good medical care was something we gave a lot of thought to over the years when we were deciding where to settle when we retired. At times we would put a higher priority on that, and that would push is towards the CdA area. If we lowered that priority Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry would float to the top. I tell people that in the end locating in a rural area such as where we live is a decision made with the heart, not the head. Just be sure you are giving it enough thought that you are making a decision with your eyes wide open. When it comes to medical care north Idaho is not like Portland.
As you travel around the state, I'm sure you'll discover many more similarities than differences. The things you may notice the most vividly at first may well be discovered to be common.
I think you're doing an excellent job of looking Idaho over. I hope you visit the entire list; if you do, it will give you a realistic understand of what life here is and isn't.
If your husband's medical is a major consideration, I agree that Boise is probably the best city in the state for that, but there are others; Idaho Falls is smaller, but it also has an over-sized medical community here, due to it's huge service area as a hub city. The same may be true on an even smaller scale of Twin Falls, which is also a hub city that services a large surrounding area.
But size alone does not denote quality. Most of the doctors I know who moved to Idaho did so because they wanted to live here, not because they wanted to make big doctor money. Some have come to practice leading-edge medicine in a less rushed, congested and critical place than a big city.
Idaho allows these guys time, a major consideration when it comes to developing a solid practice based on new technology.
That's one of the things you will notice the most here. Idahoans don't rush about. We take all things more slowly, patiently, and more laid-back here. Hustle-bustle is on a different scale here than in Portland.
Things like convenience are on a different scale, too, and city congestion, and a lot of other stuff that is much, much different from Portland.
You will notice the differences in odd ways and places, too.
Our highways are next to empty in comparison, and the passing lane on a 4-lane is just another lane here; you will get stuck behind a diver ahead in the 'fast' lane who pokes along, oblivious to the faster drivers behind, following in a line. No big deal. Sooner or later, they'll move over into the slow lane.
It's not our scenery that makes us what we are. It's the small stuff like that driving that you will remember the most after you go back. Life in general is live on a much different scale of importance than it's lived in other places. You will take for granted things we do not, and we take for granted things you won't.
We have, for my husband and I, the opportunity of a lifetime. I have been a Home Depot department supervisor for 13 years in Portland Oregon. An opportunity has opened up for me to become an ASM, Assistant Store Manager, if I transfer to an Idaho store, which is a dream come true. So far, I have visited the Sandpoint and Coeur D A'lene Home Depots. I loved the Sandpoint store. The fresh air and that mountain situated behind the store was like a Norman Rockwell painting for a Home Depot lifer like myself. The Coeur D A'lene Home Depot was like a Portland Oregon store! The parking lot was like a demolition derby as I swerved around trying to avoid speeding cars and uncorralled shopping carts in the clearly overcrowded parking lot.
We are planning to visit more stores in two weeks during my vacation. On my list are the five Boise area stores, two in Boise, Eagle, Nampa, and Meridian. Then, there are Pocatello, Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, and Lewiston.
Our main need is good-excellent health care for my disabled husband. For wants, an area with low crime, and a home on small acreage-not more than ten. A buddy of mine in Star will put us up for the week while we look.
Any ideas of where we should definitely look and also areas to avoid will be greatly appreciated. And of course, any Home Depot store experiences, positive or negative.
Thanks for your help!
We're building a retirement cabin outside of Sandpoint, and we rely heavily on the Ponderay Home Depot. However, we still have our primary residence in SoCal, so that was where we put in our big order of trapezoid/view Andersen windows. First we talked with Andersen, who steered us toward a local SoCal Home Depot. We gave all the measurements (supplied by our builder) to the local Home Depot Windows department who then sent the order on to Ponderay. But when the windows arrived at our property, we got a puzzled call from our builder: Did we really want the angle of the trapezoid windows to be 2 inches off the angle of the roof slant? Good grief. The fools at the local HD had sent the wrong numbers to Ponderay! And having to look at the wrong window angle forever, in view windows, was just not an option. So we got busy talking with the Ponderay HD, and a nice guy fixed everything for us. We couldn't return the wrong windows, since it was a special order, but we got a second set of trapezoids at half price. And this time they were perfect. And if we want to build a guest cabin, we've got two super trapezoids ready to go! I thought it was a good, reasonable solution, and we feel confident that the Ponderay HD will keep providing good service for us (but "buyer beware" is always a good rule!).
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