Business Focus: Accounting firm gets historic space

Looking at pictures of the historic downtown Rathdrum building, debris littering the walkways, a tattered display case bisecting the main split-room of the shop and five varying levels of concrete foundation that marked the building’s age like the rings of a fallen tree, it’s clear that Diane Berreth is not short on vision.

Today, a quick peak inside the 83-year-old edifice along West Main Street reveals a wholly transformed place, nearly finished and almost ready for Berreth and the rest of her Adept Business Solutions’ staff to set up shop.

“It was rough, it was so bad,” said Berreth, owner of the 12-year-old accounting business, about taking on the restoration of the structure. After nearly four months of construction and renovation, the accounting service will christen their new office at 8065 W. Main St. with a ceremony and open house this August. For Berreth and company, the move can’t come soon enough.

The Kellogg native had been on the lookout for a new place to crunch numbers in Rathdrum for several months, since Adept had simply outgrown the 900-square-foot shop on North Main Street. Boxes of folders and paperwork are stacked high, her staff is getting increasingly cramped and her 12-year-old dog, Oliver, is running out of room to roam. “I had almost given up,” Berreth said, referring to her search for a fresh workplace.

That is, until she happened by the building situated near the Mill Street railroad crossing with the “For Sale By Owner” sign in the window. Despite the nature of the interior, Berreth could see a dormant domicile that would be perfectly suited as a home for her business; the location couldn’t be better and the space was twice that of their current cramped office just a few blocks away. Also, restoring a piece of Rathdrum’s history and helping revitalize the downtown district were central in Berreth’s business plan.

“The downtown was pretty much dead when I moved back up here,” she said about leaving California and returning to North Idaho more than a decade ago, “but they are getting it back up.”

Though Berreth was convinced of the new location, others were more cautious. Mike Gardner, an employee with Kiel Construction, went on a walkthrough with the enrolled agent to survey the building’s integrity. “There was a lot to be done,” he recalled. “The place was a mess, but I could see the vision.”

In the midst of the mess, and even though some rafters were visibly scorched from a long-ago fire that swept through downtown and destroyed a neighboring business, the structure itself was found to be sound. “That’s when we started to get excited about preserving it,” Berreth said.

In January she purchased the historic brick structure, which was originally a meat market when it was built in 1924 and has since been, among other things, a barber shop and cafe, and Kiel Construction went to work in May. The initial two weeks of construction were spent clearing out more than two full loads of debris on the bed of a 24-foot-long truck, and after several more trailer trips, Adept Business Services’ new residence started to take shape.

“We were trying to keep it as much as we could the same basic building,” Berreth said. While the outside looks much as it did in the early 20th century, the inside has been tailored for a modern bookkeeping business; the concrete floor has been leveled and the layout has been split into several quarters, including a reception area, conference room, ample office space, a break room and more, though there are still a few week’s worth of construction remaining before it’s ready for business.

Val Smith, a client of the accounting service and Post Falls’ Realtor with Windermere, helped Berreth secure the location. She knew there was much to be done, but had faith in the vision. “It needed a lot of work to restore it,” she said, but “I think we need more of that; instead of tearing down old buildings, we need to preserve our heritage.”