Northside school gets new life as B&B

BONNERS FERRY – When the Northside School was built in Bonners Ferry in 1912, who’d have guessed people would be paying someday to sleep in the principal’s office?

Now, 95 years later, the school has been turned into a charming bed and breakfast.

In 2005, Bonners Ferry native Ruth Perry and her architect husband, Gene, bought the old school.

“It was my husband’s idea to turn it into a bed and breakfast. He looked at it through an architect’s eyes and saw what could be done to it,” said Ruth Perry. “I looked at it and saw a lot of work. We had to take down corridors and put in walls and move other walls around.”

The school closed its doors in 1991 and eventually was purchased by a family who made it their home for 10 years.

When the Perrys bought it, they had a chore ahead of them. “All the stairs were covered in a layer of concrete that the school district had put on years ago, so we had to take all of that off.

“But that wasn’t the worst part. Underneath the concrete were layers and layers of black urethane they had put on the floors over the years. We basically had to scrape and scrape and scrape.”

All the old wooden doors were stripped of 93 years’ worth of paint. Today, they hang in their original beauty. And one of the first things the Perrys added was an elevator so guests wouldn’t have to manage the many stairs.

“A lot of former students have stopped by to see the changes or they just pull up out front to look at it,” said Ruth Perry. “I think people were afraid this building would be torn down like the school across the river.”

One new addition that former students will notice is the large swimming pool outside.

The original plan was to have the shallow end closest to the school and the deep end facing away, but workers hit a wall of granite that couldn’t be moved. They were forced to flip the pool plans so the shallow end lies over the granite.

“We’re not finished by any means,” said Ruth Perry. “We plan to build a deck that overlooks the pool, and it’ll have steps going down to the hot tub.”

Saving enough room for themselves – a three-bedroom, two-bath owners’ unit – the Perrys still were able to create nine themed guest rooms and a formal dining area.

The Northside School Bed and Breakfast opened the first of this year.

Ruth Perry remembers her first day attending school in the building – and it isn’t with fond memories.

“I went to first grade here, but I wasn’t supposed to go to this school. I was supposed to go to the Southside School, where my grandmother was a cook. On the first day, there were so many kids that they decided to bus a load of them over to the Northside School, and somehow I got picked,” she said.

“I remember when they brought us here, one little girl stood up in that window over there, screaming and pounding, ‘I wanna go home!’ and I felt like joining her. I wanted to see Grandma.”

Fifty years later, Ruth Perry once again walked through the doors of the Northside School, only this time, she owned it.

She has enjoyed decorating the themed rooms, each with its own bathroom and incredibly high ceiling. Several still have the old slate blackboards on the walls, and the B&B has interesting memorabilia throughout.

During the renovation the Perrys found oodles of antique marbles, a vintage Crayola box and worn toy jacks that surely had been snatched up by a child’s hand between catches of a rubber ball. They also found many tiny antique bottles and a very large skeleton key that once may have opened the doors to the school.

The original school bell that rang to let kids know it was time to go inside sits just inside the doorway, along with old black-and-white photos of classes as early as 1915. Each of these treasures has found a place in the school once again, in frames on the wall or tucked into shadow boxes.

The Northside School Bed and Breakfast, a majestic brick structure perched on the hillside across the Kootenai River from the “old town” of Bonners Ferry, can be seen from almost anywhere in town.

It was a place of learning for thousands of children for most of a century, and with people like Gene and Ruth Perry finding new purpose for the old girl, it’ll be filled with people and laughter well into the next century.

Maybe you, too, will pay to sleep in the principal’s office.