Chic peek

When you step through the door of Bob and Carla Besser’s house, you step right into the heart of their home. The small house that began life as a tiny mill cottage in Coeur d’Alene doesn’t have a fancy entryway, or a front parlor kept spiffy for company.

The front door opens directly into the kitchen of the cozy cottage.

The house, which has grown from its original 500 square feet into a compact two-story home full of country charm, will be featured with eight other houses on Sunday’s second annual Shabby Chic Shoppe Tour of Homes in Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls.

A previous owner added the family room to the rear of the structure, and a second story containing two bedrooms and a bathroom. The cottage was then sold to friends of Carla Besser and her first husband, Dennis Noe.

“Every time we’d visit I would daydream about what I would do if it were our home,” Besser says. A few years later she got the chance to make her dream come true when they purchased the house from their friends.

Although the little house was structurally sound, it needed a lot of updating. Noe and Besser replaced the windows, doors, carpet and flooring. “Then we took one room at a time and worked on each room and the bathrooms,” she says. They restored the pine paneling and ceilings and added new fixtures in the bathrooms.

The couple added a balcony off the second-story master bedroom. In the small back yard, they put in two low decks, trees, shrubs and a wood fence for privacy.

“Dennis and I worked well together,” Besser says. “It took awhile to figure out each other’s strengths. We were good at different things, but we made a good team.”

While they were busy converting from wood stove heat to a gas stove, Noe was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “We just thought he was working too hard,” Besser says. “When he finally went to the doctor, we found out how ill he really was.”

Now the sturdy gas heater provides warmth to the entire house. “I think the Lord had a hand in that,” Besser says. “I wouldn’t have been able to manage the wood stove.”

The couple had only lived in the home for eight years when Noe died in 1998, nine months after his diagnosis. “Before he died, Dennis told me it would be all right if I moved, but he said to wait at least a year before I made a decision,” Besser says.

She chose to remain in the house.

When she remarried two years ago, Besser was afraid her new husband, Bob Besser, wouldn’t be comfortable moving into the house she had shared with another husband. “But he loved this house, and he knew how much I loved it,” she says. “He didn’t see any reason to move.”

The pair added their own touches. A kitchen re-do was recently completed. Soft putty-colored cabinets and a deep farm sink warm the room. The existing kitchen island was removed and a small harvest table was put in its place. “The table was built by a friend of my father,” Besser says. “Then, when I couldn’t find a little sideboard like I wanted, he made that for me, too.”

In the family room, new slipcovers of vintage-looking fabric were made for the sofa and chairs, and lace curtains scattered with embroidered flowers hang on the windows.

Besser took a length of vintage cotton eyelet and gathered it to make a lampshade for the table lamp. “I saw that downtown at The Shabby Chic Shoppe and I thought, ‘I could do that,’ ” she says. “I get a lot of ideas just looking around in there.”

An old pine door, with the original doorknob and layers of peeling paint, stands in the corner of the family room, behind a tall potted plant.

The balcony off the master bedroom is filled with potted plants, and a shabby vintage quilt hangs over the banister. She also uses a quilt to cover the swing on the front porch. “I pick quilts up all the time,” Besser says. “They don’t have to be old, just a bargain.”

Lately, Besser has been focusing on landscaping. The small trees she planted with Noe 13 years ago have grown and changed the back yard into a shady retreat. Hostas and other shade-loving plants grow around statuary and the found objects Besser has incorporated into the exterior décor.

“I see things and I immediately try to think how I can use them outdoors,” she says.

A small metal-folding cot lays on its side to form a trellis for climbing plants, and a vintage wood ironing board stands on her side yard. Stained-glass windows and old enamelware are tucked into corners. A pair of iron chairs and a table covered with a ruffled floral cloth sit under the shade tree in the center of the yard.

A small flower bed at the front of the house features a well-used wheelbarrow planted with flowering annuals. “My husband picked it up when he was traveling and gave it to me for Christmas,” Besser says. “How many women would be thrilled to get a rusty old wheelbarrow as a gift from their husband?”

Sandra Bechthold, owner of The Shabby to Chic Shoppe and the tour organizer, says the Besser house is probably the smallest on the tour. “That’s what makes it fun,” she says. “A couple of the houses are really quite large, and then you have a wonderful little house like Carla’s, so there is something for everyone.”

Besser is looking forward to sharing her home with the people who take the tour. “There is a lot of love and laughter in this house, and a few tears,” she says. “I think people will see that, and maybe they’ll feel it, too.”