Home Depot Inc., of Atlanta, has leased land at the northeast corner of U.S. 95 and Sunset Avenue in Coeur dAlene and plans to build a store there, says Amy Friend, a Fullerton, Calif.-based company spokeswoman.


Earlier, Home Depot had said it planned to build a store in Silver Lake Center, a planned retail development in Coeur dAlene, but late last year the giant home-improvement chain instead decided to look for an alternate site. At that time, Friend declined to elaborate on why the chain opted against the Silver Lake Center, except to say, the company was looking at sites with better access to our primary customers.


Friend says she doesnt know when the company plans to break ground on its planned 130,000-square-foot store. She says the construction timeline for the project will depend on how quickly the company can secure a building permit from the city of Coeur dAlene for the store. Last month, Friend said that Home Depot hoped to open a store in Coeur dAlene by early 1999, which would mean that construction would have to begin by mid-1998.


Home Depot has begun work on an environmental impact study, and hopes to meet with Coeur dAlene city planning officials within the next two weeks to begin discussing plans for the store, she says.


Home Depot is the nations leading home-improvement retailer. The company had sales of $18.4 billion and net income of $916 million in the first nine months of fiscal 1997, which ended Nov. 2. It operates 547 Home Depot stores in the U.S. and 31 Home Depot stores in Canada. Home Depot opened a store at 5101 E. Sprague in Spokane last yeara stones throw away from an Eagle Hardware & Garden Inc. outlet thats also on East Spragueand has begun work on a second store here, at the North Division-U.S. 2 Y.


Home Depot has been waging a pitched battle in the Pacific Northwest with Eagle, the regional chain launched by David J. Heerensperger in 1990 with its first store in Spokane. In the Puget Sound area, some of the two chains stores are located across the street from one another. Eagle opened a store in Coeur dAlene last month at 901 Appleway Avenue. That location is several blocks south of Home Depots planned store site. The Home Depot site, however, is closer to Eagles site than the property where Home Depot first said it would build, before changing its mind.