The foundation for the MacDonald family’s home was laid twenty years before any building began, when Mike MacDonald’s parents, John “Mac” and Cloie MacDonald, drove through the Bitterroot valley as a young married couple in the mid-1950’s.
In love with each other, they also fell in love with the land, and made the Bitterroot their dream. But Mac had a job in Missoula, and there they lived.
Through the years that followed, the family grew and prospered, but their dream of living in the Bitterroot lingered. So in 1972, the couple bought a piece of land outside of Stevensville, complete with creek and seclusion.
Mike and his siblings were teenagers when his parents bought the land, and they were expected to work.
“My (youngest) brother was two,” MacDonald said. “He couldn’t do much, but he helped move rocks.”
MacDonald’s father was a teacher, so in summer, the family “vacationed” on their land, with everyone pitching in with the building. Cousins, uncles and aunts all helped build the cedar home that Mike would later buy from his father.
MacDonald has the original canceled check his father wrote to pay for the cedar logs. It’s tucked into a photo album chronicling the home’s transformation from logs to poured foundation to two-story home situated on a hillside overlooking a creek and five-acre meadow. The squared logs were purchased for just over $23,000. The cedar came delivered on the backs of two semi trailers.
“They just dumped the load out and drove off,” MacDonald said.
The family spent the first few days just sorting logs. Luckily, there was a plan to go with the pile. To facilitate putting the home together, the logs were notched with a “double tongue and groove” style, MacDonald said, fitting one into another.
Like Lincoln logs, “every layer of every wall has to go down before the next layer goes on,” MacDonald explained. The logs are solid, and though they’re made to fit together, the house’s wiring had to be planned out, drawn on and holes drilled into each one, as the walls went up. To house conduit, his uncle or another family member would mark the log after it was placed, be sure it aligned with the one underneath, and drill out a hole, repeating the process for each layer. Despite the help of “aunts, cousins and uncles” the building process was slow.
“It took two years, basically,” MacDonald said. “We got the walls and the roof up the first year,” but had to finish the interior from within. Their first year in the house, the family lived in the basement, using a portable kitchenette until their upstairs was complete.
MacDonald speaks with an obvious sense of pride about his family’s project.
“A lot of people don’t build their own homes,” he mused, “they have them built.”
This home, however, sports contributions from all his family members.
Fireplaces and floors were built after the family “spent long hours gathering rock.”
“One of my cousins was the ranger in Plains at the time, and he knew where there were some good outcroppings.” The family brought back rock “pickup load by pickup load.”
“Every time we went out we were looking for rock,” MacDonald said.
It wasn’t just rocks the family hauled back. The family loved to camp, and during one such trip to Idaho, his mom spied a downed cedar tree she thought would be just perfect as a fireplace mantle.
“It was on the other side of the river, of course,” MacDonald remembered, smiling.
Undeterred, the family floated the log across the Lochsa, and brought it home, where it does, indeed, make a fine mantle piece.
In addition to using native resources, MacDonald said his father was concerned with energy efficiency. He put in radiant floor heat, solar panels and vinyl double pane windows. “Those were kind of new 30 years ago.”
The family also worked to change the face of the hillside.
“It was just cheatgrass, knapweed and rocks,” MacDonald said of the original site. Now it boasts fruit trees and shade trees, flowers and shrubs.
“It’s a very different hillside than it was 30 years ago.”
The whole place, MacDonald said, is born of his family’s “blood, sweat and tears.”
“It’s a neat place,” MacDonald said. “I don’t know of another place like it in the valley.”
“You can’t see the whole of another house from here,” he added, which was his father’s goal. “It’s very nice,” he said, surveying the land, where a small creek ripples through a tree-lined gulch. “It’s very peaceful.”
MacDonald purchased the family home from his father in 1998.
“Mom died in a car accident on Highway 93 in December of 1996,” MacDonald said.
“Dad was going to remarry in ’98 and the plan was both respective spouses would sell their houses and start anew.”
“I came home with my daughters to pick up some furniture and I wanted to move back here. I’m really the only one of us four kids who wanted to move back, so it just worked out,” he said.
Although his parents had lived there for 20 years, there was work yet to do. The basement “was half unfinished when we moved back,” MacDonald said.
“When we moved in, we did a lot of the final finish work - putting up molding, trim and things like that.”
The MacDonalds moved the laundry room downstairs, put a pantry upstairs, redid bathrooms, put in new carpeting and rebuilt the front deck. They added a back deck and transformed the garage into a workshop for Mike, adding a new double car garage for vehicles. And they did “everything” to the kitchen, MacDonald said, including replacing all the cabinets and putting in new flooring.
“The old cabinets were home built, and the doors didn’t meet up anymore,” MacDonald said. “The flooring was older, darker indoor/outdoor carpeting.”
The MacDonalds removed the old boiler as well, and installed a propane furnace.
“Every year we had a logging truck load of wood brought in,” MacDonald said. “We spent $1,500 to $1,800 on wood, and a lot of hours chopping it.
My wife and I are both in our 50’s. No one’s gonna wanna do that work anymore.”
Plus, his wife and he both work in Missoula, and there was no one to keep the furnace fire stoked a steady six hours to get the boiler up to heat, he said.
“The propane is a better choice. We have a much more consistent, even heat.”
One thing MacDonald didn’t change was the writing on the walls.
Pencil marks from kids mar some of the walls, MacDonald said, along with original markings made by uncles when putting the building together. A sister was married on the lawn out back 26 years ago, and his younger daughter intends to follow suit some day.
“My older daughter wanted to get married here, but she wanted to marry in winter, and I said ‘No’,” he related. “Have you seen what it’s like out here in the winter?”
Three generations of MacDonald children have lived in the upstairs loft bedroom, along with foster families Mike’s parents took in. And “my grandmother lived out here with us in the summers,” he added.
“There’s a lot of family involvement here,” MacDonald said, looking around. “All of what you see is the result of 30 years of work.”
MacDonald and his wife hope to retire soon, and do a bit of traveling. He plans to sell the house to his youngest brother, now 37.
He’s happy knowing it will stay in his family, and that he’ll always have a place to come back to. After all, he said, “It's a beautiful home, and it's filled with memories. It’s got a bit of history here.”
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