Greta showed Hank out.
He eventually worked as an installation subcontractor for Dickstra Cedar Works for three years.
He retired in 2018.
By every account, he was meticulous, professional, and extremely knowledgeable about houses throughout Bedford County.
That knowledge turned out to be genuinely useful.
After 2015, Dickstra Cedar Works continued expanding.
Between 2015 and 2019, the company moved beyond Bedford County into the broader Nashville metropolitan market during one of the region’s strongest sustained periods of residential construction.
Lana developed three main product lines.
The first was the standard residential cedar installation.
The second was a premium line featuring custom shelf configurations and built-in cedar drawers.
The third was a wholesale panel system sold to contractors and custom-home builders who wanted to offer cedar closets as an upgrade.
The wholesale line changed the scale of the company.
Lana was no longer limited by the number of installations her own crew could finish each week.
She could manufacture panels for homes she would never enter.
Other contractors could install the product.
Dickstra Cedar Works began reaching counties Lana herself rarely visited.
The supply agreement with Musgrave expanded twice in 2016 and again in 2018.
By then, the mill was making four deliveries each month and had assigned a specific employee to manage the Dickstra account.
Don Crowley retired in 2017.
At his retirement gathering, he joked that the Dickstra account had transformed material the mill once paid to dispose of into a line item the accountants actually liked seeing on monthly reports.
People laughed.
It was not the same kind of laugh Lana had heard at the home-and-garden show.
The relationship also attracted academic attention.
The University of Tennessee’s agricultural and forestry extension community was increasingly interested in regional wood-waste utilization.
A graduate student named Tobias Johansson eventually wrote a case study about Dickstra Cedar Works as an example of closed-loop regional material recovery in small-scale manufacturing.
Lana agreed to be interviewed on one condition.
Tobias had to spend a full working day in the shop before asking his questions.
He agreed.
The study was published in a regional forestry journal in 2018 and was later cited in additional work examining sustainable wood-product manufacturing.
Lana kept a copy.
She did not frame it.
She put it inside a manila folder in the filing cabinet beside the supply agreements and tax records.
By the end of 2019, Dickstra Cedar Works generated approximately $247,000 annually from installations and another $189,000 from wholesale panel sales.
Combined revenue was just over $436,000.
The company had seven full-time employees and a network of installation subcontractors operating across four counties.
The Musgrave supply arrangement remained one of its greatest competitive advantages.
Kiln-dried cedar byproduct cost Lana a fraction of what equivalent retail lumber would have cost.
That had been true for a decade.
The pencil mill had once treated those pieces as waste.
Lana had built a substantial regional company around them before many of the people who laughed at her booth in 2010 fully understood what they had dismissed.
Then came the spring of 2020.
The pandemic disrupted nearly every part of the American economy.
Dickstra Cedar Works was no exception.
In-home installation work stopped in March.
Lana’s installers stayed home.
Subcontractors stayed home.
The workshop operated at sharply reduced capacity with Lana, Greta, and one additional employee.
They worked cautiously and tried to understand what their business looked like when sending crews into occupied houses was no longer practical.