interestingly, we looked at a home right on the river (Bitterroot River) just below and maybe a 5 minute walk from the one we bought. It needed a lot of attention and the zoning is very mixed in the area. Sharing the drive was a house with a big industrial building and a bunch of old rotting cars laying around. On the other side of the lot was a new subdivision of cookie cutter homes on acre lots going in. Add in the float traffic on the river during the summer and you lost privacy. Then there were the bugs, as well as flood risk. We passed. Not only passed, we hated the area and stopped looking in the Bitterroot Valley.
Then this home showed up on my FB feed of our broker. I had my wife drive up and look at it. She called and said "you should come up and look at this. There's potential, but not sure (she was concerned about some of the dated features)." So I flew up to Spokane where my wife picked me up and drove me the 3.5 hours back to the Missoula area to view the house.
We like a sprawling single story home, not two story. That was this home. We also like cozy ranch, not friggin mansion formal. It was a custom design and build and after doing some work on it, it is well built. Exterior walls used 2x8 studs and were shot full of fiberglass insulation. In the dead of winter during an arctic blast, the furnaces will cycle on about every 3 hours. The home was designed to maximize views and it has them in spades from virtually every room. It was built in 1989, but saw low usage. Still things break as a function of age as well as use, But I am handy and have been going through the home inspection report and crossing things off. I'm just used to doing that stuff.
One negative is that the garage is just two single bays, but we have the room (24 acres) to build another right next to it. It would be nice to leave some cars up there and just fly up, though my wife prefers to drive with the dogs.
Oh and the fly fishing all along the Bitterroot is awesome and we also have the Clark Fork, Blackfoot, Rock Creek, East and West Forks of the Bitterroot to choose from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq33Ei6iAos
Hey while my wife got her awesome library, looky what I got down in my basement/man cave:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnxMc_ZjdNg