GREENWOOD — Perseverance is paying off for Maine woodcrafters and Louise Jonaitis.

Jonaitis, of Portland and Hanover, is a former social worker turned Maine tourmaline miner turned owner of a Maine dowel mill and Moosehead Furniture.

Jonaitis has hired 24 workers in eight months since buying and restarting the Saunders Bros. dowel mill. And, the company has made $850,000 from orders and landed a huge job from IKEA, a Scandinavian-based furniture company that sells globally.

All of that in a “bare-bones startup” during the country’s worst recession and an overly long Maine winter, she said.

“We got busy suddenly,” Jonaitis said Tuesday at the mill.

Former mill clients are returning after learning the mill is back in business.

“It’s been all of a sudden that everybody wants stuff and we’re just like, ‘Wow!’” she said. “We’ve got so many orders we can’t keep up. There’s a huge demand for dowels and furniture pins, those little wooden pins. We’ve made boxes and boxes of them for clients from all over the U.S.”

Production and Plant Manager Mark Hamlin said the company had a lot of dowel orders and some orders for turnings.

Turnings are handles, said Jonaitis, who grew up in Rumford.

“We’ve done a lot of croquet handles and the baby cribs and baby gates, so babies don’t fall down, and then the IKEA (job),” she said.

“That was a 160,000-piece order and that’s going to take us another eight weeks to finish,” she said. “That one’s really got us running, because we do a lot of things to the wood, and then we paint it after.”

“It’s just a dowel that goes into a headboard,” Hamlin said.

Jonaitis also owns the Moosehead Furniture brand, having bought that Monson plant at auction in 2010 when it — like the Saunders mill — closed.

“I love dowels, but I love furniture, also,” she said.

This winter, she had the Moosehead plant’s wood products parts trucked to the Greenwood mill, where most are kept on pallets stacked floor to ceiling in a 180-foot-long warehouse. More parts remain in trucks waiting to be offloaded.

A few weeks ago, Jonaitis hired two woodcrafters and former furniture makers to sort hundreds of thousands of the Moosehead parts into an area for assembly.

They are Bill Kane, one of the 25 Moosehead employees who lost their jobs when the Monson company closed, and David Powell of Milton Township.

When not working, Kane lives at the Greenwood plant and returns to his family in Monson on weekends.

“In this economy, you’ve got to go where you can to find work,” he said.

Powell last worked at the Saunders mill, which closed in May 2010, and before that, he worked for more than 10 years for Bethel Furniture Stock, which also closed.

“I’ve been in the wood industry since ’84 and, you know what, they’re about all closed,” Powell said.

That’s why he said it was so special when Jonaitis offered him a job in his trade, manufacturing, which has been dying off across Maine for years.

“It’s like having your hopes and your dreams end and all of a sudden, Santa Claus brings you a present and it starts all over again,” Powell said. “It is great.”

The Saunders Bros. mill also will complete previous Moosehead Furniture lines and sell them through Stanley’s Furniture in Rumford, which sold those products for 60 years.

Jonaitis credits Stanley’s owner Rob Dupill for getting her into wood manufacturing.

“He was such an inspiration,” she said of Dupill, who passed away Dec. 25, 2010.

Before he died, she and Dupill created the name Pennacook Falls for a new line of Moosehead kitchen furniture made from locally purchased pine that Jonaitis will soon introduce.

All of which means more jobs in the future at the Saunders mill once production mechanics are worked out this summer and the Moosehead parts are sorted, Jonaitis said.

“We took a big leap and we’re going to be doing a lot of planning in the next 90 days to get all the orders out and work really hard,” she said. “I started with five employees and now I’m up to 24 in about eight months.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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