Gage Accounting has moved around the corner to a larger space at 15 3rd Ave. E. in Polson.

Ryan Gage heads up the office and comes from a family of accountants. His grandpa, Del Gage, started an accounting firm in Cutbank, and Ryan’s father, uncle and older brother are all accountants.

A state legislator and community force, Del was also an avid golfer – a sport the rest of the clan also pursues.

Gage says he’s known he wanted to be an accountant “since I was in sixth grade.”

His job comes with having “the best employees in town, I’m sure of it,” he added.

During last year’s tax season, eight people were working in the former office at 211 Main Street, and felt “they were on top of each other.” So space is one reason the firm moved.

Another reason for the move was parking. When Gage Accounting first moved to the Main Street office, more parking was available, but as Polson’s downtown has filled up with businesses and offices, clients had to park and walk a block and a half or so to the office in the middle of winter, which is tax season. Gage says he was especially concerned about his older clients.

The accounting firm now occupies half the new building, with the other half available for lease.

But don’t get the idea that the move just involved hauling some boxes and office furniture around the corner. That happened after the remodel was finished on Oct. 16.

During the summer, Gage said his wife, Krista, and their children, Kyler, Strider and Cozette, worked in the new spot during the day, and he joined them at 4 p.m. when he got off work. Ryan’s cousin, Nate, who works at Gage Accounting, also joined in, as did Krista’s parents, who were in Polson with hammers in hand when they closed on the property July 22.

The Gage demolition crew did all the tear down, ripped up the carpeting, scraped off the old wallpaper, painted, textured, installed new flooring, and pulled wire for all the technology needed for an accounting firm.

Wire needed to be pulled from the basement up to the second floor and back down to the first floor. To do this job there was in a crawl space, and the only person who fit in was 12-year-old Cozette. She was in the crawl space with a drill and a cell phone flashlight so she could communicate with her family.

Cozette’s brothers, Kyler and Strider, could squirm into another of the crawl spaces so they also participated. Krista has a photo of the three, “just filthy,” covered in dirt, dust and cobwebs.

Kyler’s twin, Taegen, was in Bolivia serving a mission for their church and missed all the action.

Ryan said Strider told him, “That was the worst summer of my life.”

Their dad saw it differently. “It was fun,” Gage said. “It was a total family effort.”

They “moved in Oct. 16, got settled on Oct. 18 and opened on Oct. 20.”

“You can blame my wife for how nice it looks,” Gage said. They used some art pieces from his grandparents’ collection and kept some flavor of the building’s past, when it served as a law firm for years.

Constructed in 1966, the building is two stories and a basement, but the owner says, “I haven’t been brave enough to tell anyone they’ll be working in the basement.”

Attorneys Keith McCurdy and Doug Wold were involved in the original construction. It was one of the larger buildings in Polson at the time. In its heyday, attorneys Clint Fischer and Matt O’Neal and their staffs were among the 40 people who worked in the space, according to Gage, who has photos and some of the blueprints from that era.