Dan Barton, who owned a Coeur d'Alene car dealership for nearly 30 years before selling the franchise in 2004, says he now is the owner of the new Ace Hardware store that's set to open this month in the Wandermere area in Spokane.

The new store, which will occupy 12,000 square feet of space at 12908 N. Highway 395 in Wandermere Village, is slated to open later this month, Barton says. The store is being built by Vandervert Construction Inc.

Barton, who lives in Post Falls, says his son, Chris, a Wandermere-area resident, will manage the store, which will employ 10 to 15 people and will be a franchise outlet of national retailer Ace Hardware Corp.

The elder Barton says he came out of retirement because he wanted to take on a project that he could share with his son, who recently was honorably discharged from the U.S. Coast Guard.

He adds, "If I did go back into business, it wasn't going to be in cars. We just wanted to do something different."

He says he liked Ace Hardware's system. "We like what they had to offer in terms of support," Barton says. "Ace Hardware looked like a team effort."

Preparations for the new store didn't come together as quickly as he would have liked, he says, adding that construction was delayed for months because of difficulty securing financing.

"We had a real struggle from October through the spring," Barton says. The project was ready to start early last fall, "then the financing fell out." He says he eventually obtained financing through Wells Fargo Bank.

Barton says the auto dealership he owned in Coeur d'Alene, Dan Barton Cadillac Isuzu Inc., was on its way to becoming strictly a Cadillac dealer at the time he sold it to Spokane-area auto dealer George Gee in 2004. Though it was profitable in its final year under his ownership, he says the road forward for the auto industry looked like it was going to be tough. He had owned the dealership, located at 317 W. Dalton near busy U.S. 95, with his wife, Norma, since 1977.

Today, the Coeur d'Alene location is home to George Gee Cadillac Kia.