Eight years ago John McDonald had never picked up a woodworking tool in his life. An aspiring screenwriter in Los Angeles with a day job waiting tables, the frustrated 34 year old decided to try something new: making furniture.

He started by refinishing antiques and moved on to making 2x4 inspired furniture and selling it at flea markets. From there he decided to get serious. "I set up shop in my friend's guest house, bought a ton of tools and how-to books. I was a week away from my first class at Cerritos College which was 'Shop Safety' when I cut off my pinky and severed the nerve and tendon in my ring finger on a band saw. I got right back at it immediately, kept taking classes, tied a bag over my bad hand and kept waiting tables at the sushi bar (only one customer complained). I kept going because I got good pretty fast and, really, there was nothing else at that point I could do as well."

John formed his company Handmade, a nod to the craft and to his missing digits and started working full time making custom furniture, kitchens, and baths. He was a regular at all the West Coast design shows like CABoom and Dwell on Design and he got a lot of attention for his craft, attention to detail and his down to earth demeanor. His style was contemporary with mid-century and some arts-and-crafts influences "I don't have much formal training, and definitely no design background, so I just make pieces that appeal to me. Magazines, TV, whatever. From the beginning, I was lucky to find clients who pretty much gave me free rein."

Now John is expanding Handmade with a new service that makes remodelling or building out your kitchen or bathroom a lot more affordable: SEMIHandmade offers custom cabinet and drawer fronts for store bought cabinet boxes (think Ikea). And with pricing that averages about 30 percent higher than Ikea’s cabinet fronts, SEMIHandmade offers a significant upgrade. "SemiHandmade is in no way affiliated with Ikea, but we're huge fans of their multi-purpose, modular, reasonably priced products. Our goal is to simply enhance a quality product. Personalize it. And the fact is, people have been customizing Ikea kitchens for years, we're just the first company to offer it on a wide scale, and in contemporary styles." says John. Not only is the craftsmanship hard to beat, but the quality of the hardwood they offer is worlds above the MDF that’s standard at Ikea. Half the woods available are reclaimed: Douglas Fir, basketball flooring, redwood wine casks plus specialty colored laminate, sequence-matched veneers (where the doors, panels, and drawer faces all come from the same batch of veneers and lay out in a continuous, sequential pattern) and hard woods like Walnut, Teak, Bamboo, Mahogany, and White Oak. And if you're reusing your existing cabinets it means less material going into a landfill."

"Offering IKEA as a base makes us competitive with most big-box cabinet companies, but for a lot of projects we do, clients want everything custom". The Soriano House in Silver Lake (above) inspired a totally custom Mid Century style kitchen with views onto the Silver Lake Reservoir. "This the Handmade side of our company," says John,. "For everybody else, we developed SEMIHandmade. We go in, find out how flexible a potential client is—figure out the difference between what they want and really need, what the space can accomodate, the budget—and then work from there."

http://semihandmadedoors.com/