Suspicious of anything that looked like a shortcut.
He watched his daughter buy tools with the expression of a man who had decided to say nothing and wait.
Lana’s mother, Anna Lisa, had more faith in the idea.
One evening, after Lana showed her parents the Craigslist listing, Garrett put down his fork.
Lana turned the laptop toward him.
He read the listing.
Then he said, “I need to think about it.”
It was not much encouragement.
Lana took it anyway.
What she understood at 22 was that Eastern red cedar is not used like oak, cherry, or walnut.
It is softer, more variable, and suited to different applications.
But aromatic cedar has historically been valued for storage spaces because its natural oils help deter clothes moths and give enclosed spaces the characteristic cedar aroma associated with chests and wardrobes.
And that smell was not merely decorative.
It came from volatile aromatic compounds in the wood.
Lana had learned that from Dr. Wanda Okafor at Motlow State Community College.
Dr. Okafor taught a materials course most of Lana’s classmates found tedious.
Lana found it transformative.
One assignment required students to write a paper about historical uses of a domestic wood species.
Lana chose cedar.
She spent three weeks in the college library reading about cedar closets, wardrobes, storage chests, and the Lane Company of Altavista, Virginia, which had sold millions of cedar chests during the twentieth century.
She also studied the physical properties of Eastern red cedar, Juniperus virginiana, and the aromatic compounds associated with its characteristic smell and insect-deterring properties.
The assignment required ten pages.
Lana submitted thirty-one.
Dr. Okafor gave her an A.
At the bottom of the final page, she wrote:
“This is more than I asked for. It is also better than I expected. Keep going.”
Lana kept going.
The closet-organization industry in 2009 was dominated by two broad product categories.
The first was wire shelving.
It was inexpensive, adjustable, available in nearly every large home-improvement store, and familiar to anyone who had watched a folded sweater sag through a shelf or a shoe rack bend under real weight.
The second category consisted of laminated particle-board systems sold by national brands and regional competitors.
They looked clean in showrooms.
They organized space efficiently.
But Lana believed both categories shared the same basic limitation.
They organized the contents of a closet.
They did almost nothing to change the closet itself as a storage environment.
A wire-shelving closet was still simply an enclosed room.
A laminated system did not provide the aromatic properties of exposed cedar.
Lana’s research convinced her that a closet incorporating substantial exposed cedar could provide something beyond organization.
It could become a preservation-oriented storage space.
That distinction was functional.
And the material needed to build such spaces was being produced as waste by a pencil mill only a few miles from her home.
The Musgrave facility generated irregular cedar pieces as part of its manufacturing process.
Some pieces were too narrow.
Some were too short.
Some split along the edge.
They were rejected before entering the later stages of production.
In 2008, Lana had approached the facility manager, Don Crowley, and asked what happened to those rejected pieces.
Crowley told her some were chipped or disposed of and that handling the waste cost the company money.