Our Story (As told by Caleb Walston)
This journey began for us in 2016 during the renovation of our first home. Jessica wanted a barn door and like just about everything else in our ongoing home renovation at the time was out of our recently-graduated-college budget. I decided this would be my next project and after all was said and done, Jessica loved it. Of course, I was a little (let’s say a lot) proud of myself until I noticed the door was a little small to cover all of our door opening. I decided I would try to list the door on Craigslist in order to cover the material for building a new, improved version. Wouldn’t you know, someone came and got it the same day. The next few weeks I built two doors, a bigger one to go back in our basement and another to attempt to sell. Sure enough, it sold and with that Walston Door Company was born.
The next year outside of the 9-5 was spent in our garage trying to keep up with the orders we were receiving through Marketplace with the rest of the time consuming as much woodworking and door-building content as possible. Meanwhile, Jessica taught herself to develop websites and walstondoorcompany.com was launched. Nearly a year of failures, triumph, more failures and being too stubborn to quit led to us making the leap and leaving the safe, corporate jobs in June of 2017.
After a year of living in the shop in our garage, we moved our shop to the 8th floor of a 100-year-old building in the West Bottoms of Kansas City and added a showroom that our customers can visit to customize their door design, finish, handle, and hardware. We now have 3 employees who have joined us in the journey and our story continues to be written. Several hundred custom doors later we’re still learning about ourselves, our business, and life. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated on the next chapter....