Andover Cabinetry Company Begins After-School Program

Andover, MA — When the pandemic first incited national lockdowns in March of 2020, Landmark Finish, an Andover-based cabinetry company, evolved quickly to face the challenging restrictions of doing business in a socially-distant environment.

Within weeks of the lockdown’s beginning, Landmark Finish began selling “Safe Guards,” clear plastic barriers that have become instrumental in the safe, partial openings of businesses and schools across the country.

“We had a huge boom with that in the Fall, helping all the schools open again,” Deanna Junge said. “We are still making them, we are still selling them; it has slowed down a little bit.”

But owners Stewart and Deanna Junge, whose story of staying afloat in the pandemic Patch told in October, went beyond establishing this new line of safeguards and delved into a variety of branches of business that the pandemic has incited.

“We’re doing a few different things right now,” Deanna Junge said. “We obviously still have our original core business of cabinetry, where we are focusing more on home office cabinetry right now, just because everybody’s looking to outfit their home with space to work from home, so we’re still doing the cabinetry with a focus on home offices, we’re doing the safe-guards, and we’re actually in the process right now of prototyping our own line of home office furniture right now as well. We’re hoping to launch that in March.”

With these new branches and lines of business that are demonstrative of a company that is in a constant state of evolution and adaptation, a total re-brand is also in the works, with a launch date of early-March, almost exactly one year to the day that Landmark Finished was forced to close due to Covid-19 restrictions.

“We’re also actually working on rebranding the company,” Deanna Junge said. “We wanted to grow the business nationally; we wanted to do that with a stronger name that we could trademark — we’ve decided to rebrand the entire company and update it and give it a fresh new look that better ties all of these lines of business in together with each other.”

In the midst of these new ventures, Landmark Finish is working with the North Andover Youth Center to pioneer an after-school program for local middle school students, a program that is designed for and by kids with the goal of teaching the value in and skills of woodworking.

“We have two sons and they have pretty much grown up in the shop with us,” Deanna Junge said. “They’ve always been in that shop setting and have learned to safely use tools at a very young age.”

A result of this shop setting is a plethora of constant family projects — the Junge family is always doing family woodworking projects and sharing them through both Youtube and Instagram as the “Junge Makers,” where they have over 250 subscribers.

“For us, being around this stuff and making things on a regular basis is just second nature,” Deanna Junge added.

The concept of a youth after-school program was first planned out more than a year ago, pre-pandemic, and so took several months of careful planning to establish.

“A little over a year ago, we connected with Rick Gorman, the executive director of the North Andover Youth Center; he’s always looking for new programs,” Deanna Junge said. “They didn’t have the space in their facility or the expertise on their staff to run this program — he had initially pitched it to us, and then Covid hit, everything shut down and a lot of their programming got paused.”

As Covid eased up slightly over the summer, Youth programs resumed — through careful systems designed to prevent the spread of the disease, Gorman and the Youth Center were able to avoid any infections at their programs over the summer, making now a good time to begin this pilot program, despite the mounting numbers of cases across the country.

“They came up with systems early on to head off Covid, and they felt very comfortable starting the program at this time,” Stewart Junge said. “For us, it’s six people that come in the door with their chaperone, and they do the thermometer test on everyone when they go into the Youth Center. They were taking all the proper precautions.”

And through the Joseph N. Hermann Youth Center Inc. Grant, the Youth Center was able to fully fund the program, making it immediately accessible to all students who were interested.

“The kids that are coming to our program right now for the pilot program are coming free of charge,” Deanna Junge said. “The real magic of it was when we started talking with Rick and going through the details, he was very intrigued by our sons. We put our heads together and thought ‘wouldn’t a peer-to-peer instruction take this program to the next level.’”

Due to Covid restrictions, the class size for this pilot program has been reduced to six students, but that has not presented a problem in any capacity.

“It’s actually worked out great for a number of reasons,” Deanna Junge said. “First of all, we have a great ratio of supervisors and instructors to students. We have six students, Brody and Colby, our sons, are the instructors, and then Stewart and I are always here supervising, as well as a chaperone from the Youth Center. We also have one of our employees who’s always here filming and doing video. It’s almost a 1:1 ratio — to start off with a small group has been good for the boys because it’s not too overwhelming to them.”

Though the program is titled simply as an intro to woodworking, the intricacies of that are not quite what it would seem. Where this program differs from a traditional shop class is the safe focus on making things by hand, while also allowing for instruction in modern methods of woodworking.

“We have gone to very great lengths to make sure that the program we’re putting on here is very safe,” Deanna Junge said. “The first thing we do when the students come in is we recap the safety checklist. We’re making sure the kids have that hands-on experience that we’re looking for them to get, but that they’re not hands-on with tools that could potentially be dangerous.”

And rather than incorporating the use of saws and other cutting tools into the curriculum, the students are instead learning how to work with Avid CNC, a software that allows them to make designs and program machines to create those designs.

“A big part of the program is to teach current methods of woodworking,” Stewart Junge said. “And current methods of woodworking include operating a CNC, a Computer Numerical Control. The kids learn how to program a design on software, and then program tool pathing on the CNC.”

Despite this merely being a pilot program, it is already generating a fair amount of excitement.

“We’re getting such positive feedback that we really feel like this is probably going to take off,” Deanna Junge said. “We would welcome other youth centers and other organizations to come partner with us so that we can get more programs going.”

With interest already in a potential father-son woodworking class, the Junge’s are exploring a future of education in woodworking as an additional offshoot of their established cabinetry company.

“I would like to be a conduit to those people that would like to learn a trade,” Stewart Junge said. “Doing creative things with your hands and your mind. I see a need for parents to do more things with their kids, especially with Covid and lockdown.”

And through everything, the Junge’s are always striving to seek out the silver lining of a dark situation.

“It’s all stuff that we just have to keep positive and keep the kids positive as well, that’s kind of been our mantra through this whole thing,” Deanna Junge said. “Going to work every day and keep innovating and try to come out the other side a stronger company.”