The Ponderosa Bed and Breakfast Hotel Accomodations in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho

The Ponderosa Bed & Breakfast

As featured in Country's Best Log Homes - July 2001

When Jack and Betty Bonzey honeymooned in British Columbia 35 years ago, they drove through the Idaho panhandle on their way back to their California ranch house. "What a great place to live," they thought.

Stop. Fast forward. It's January 1989, and the Bonzeys are retracing their honeymoon steps through a snowy Idaho winter. They stop in Athol. "What a wonderful place to retire," they think. They spend 10 days looking for the right property in the area on which to spend their leisure years.

"There was nothing out here then," recalls Betty, "just a working farm with bales of hay." But farmland is just what they envisioned, because it offers peace and tranquility. So they buy it. For five years, they spend every summer working their 10 acres of land. What remained were lovely Ponderosa pines, all “volunteers,” that is, naturally seeded and not planted by man.

When Jack retires in 1994, the Bonzeys are ready to build. For years, the Bonzeys have been collecting log home magazines and books. The idea of building a log home is the next logical option to investigate, so they begin working with a handcrafted log homebuilder.

The Bonzeys design the 7,200 Square-foot, two-story house with basement themselves, knowing that they want this bucolic setting to feature a home suitable for visitors. They christen it “The Ponderosa” Bed & Breakfast and live in the barn in their travel trailer during the nine-month building process. Betty stains all the wood, with the exception of the white pine ceiling and the Arkansas red oak floors. Jack cleans up the work site each night to expedite the contractors’ work the following day.

The Bonzeys choose natural gas, forced-air heating for the house and design the bedrooms with electric baseboard heat that features individual thermostats. The great room has a Vermont Casting top-of-the-line gas log fireplace.

“We designed the guest rooms with the closets and bathrooms in between each other and then double insulated. They use of a high-density soundproof carpet pad prevents and noise from coming through the floor, which makes the rooms soundproof.

The log beds, built by the contractor in the garage, are brought upstairs piece by piece and assembled in the rooms. “Each bed weighs a thousand pounds,” says Jack, who adds that when one bed was place too close to the closet, they had to call the contractor back in to take apart the bed before they could move it a mere six inches.

“We both sat on the floor and tried to slide it by pushing with our feet, but we couldn’t even budge it, “ says Betty. “In fact, four construction workers couldn’t move it either!”

When it comes to the design of the entryway, Betty steps in. “I'd been carrying around this photograph from a magazine of an entry-way of a conventional home for years. We liked it, but we redesigned the stair-case for the center instead of the side and used lodge pole pine logs and red fir to build it.”

Betty still gets a thrill when she ushers guests into their home and they say, “Wow!” When she takes them into the living area, she explains that it’s called the “Great Room” because “We’ve had so many wonderful guests here and shared so many great times in it.”

Today, Betty and Jack have opened their doors to over 2,100 guests in just six years, but they never grow tired of talking about the joy they have living the their new log home. “I love it,” says Betts. “It’s warm in winter and cool in summer, and we don’t even need air conditioning.

E-mail: stay@theponderosa.net

The Ponderosa B&B
P.O. Box 5022
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83814

Local: (208) 683-2251
Toll Free: (888) 683-2251
Fax: (208) 683-5112

Member of the North Idaho Bed and Breakfast Association