Sandy and Nancy Seright and their son, Brett, plan to develop an Ace Hardware store in Rathdrum that will be their third in North Idaho.

The new 18,000-square-foot Rathdrum store will have 15,000 square feet of retail space, not including an outdoor garden center, and will be located at 14236 N. Highway 41, just south of Boekel Road, Brett Seright says. 

Construction of the store is expected to begin this month and to be completed by the end of the year, with a soft opening planned early next year, he says. Cory Trapp, of Longwell+Trapp Architects PLLC, of Hayden, is the architect on the roughly $3 million project, and Coeur d’Alene-based Young Construction Group of Idaho Inc. will be the general contractor, he says.

 Like other Ace Hardware outlets, the new store in Rathdrum will offer an extensive selection of products in categories such as paint, lawn, and garden, including brands such as Stihl, Craftsman, and Valspar, says a press release about the planned store.

Seright says the store likely will employ 10 to 12 people within the first year, most of them new hires and probably a majority of them full time. He says new hires slated to staff the new store could begin training this fall at the Serights’ other Ace Hardware stores, located in Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene.

Sandy and Nancy Seright opened their first hardware store in Post Falls in November 1979, back then under the Coast to Coast Hardware brand. That store was down the street from the current store’s location at 1604 E. Seltice Way, and had just 4,000 square feet of space and employed about five people, the serightsace.com website says.

In 1983, that store was expanded to 7,000 square feet of space, and five years later, the Serights moved the store to a newly constructed 14,000-square-foot building at its current location. In 2006, they added another 4,000 square feet of space to the east side of that structure, and now employ more than 20 people there, the website says. In 2009, the Serights opened their store at 1217 N. Fourth in Coeur d’Alene, where they currently employ about 10 people, it says.

Brett Seright says that store has about 12,000 square feet of retail space, so the new Rathdrum store will be in between the family’s two current stores in size.

Opening a store in Rathdrum is “something we’ve been pursuing for a number of years,” he says, noting that a True Value hardware store that formerly had been operating there closed several years ago.

Sandy and Nancy Seright were named the 2015 Family-Owned Small Business of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Seattle District Office at an April 30 awards gala at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. The Seattle District Office serves the state of Washington and North Idaho.

“Entrepreneurship is about taking risks. That’s what we did with our first location,” Sandy Seright said in an SBA press release announcing the award. “We borrowed money from our family, sold off our home, and moved to somewhere new to buy our first store. It worked out in the long run.”

As the business grew, the couple made use of the SBA 504 loan program to fund the opening of their second store, a decision that Sandy said was one of the best they made.

With nearly 5,000 locally owned and operated hardware stores around the world, Ace claims to be the largest hardware cooperative in the industry. Based in Oak Brook, Ill., Ace and its subsidiaries currently operate 14 distribution centers in the U.S. and also have distribution capabilities in Shanghai, China; Panama City, Panama; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It says its retailers’ stores are located in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and about 60 countries.