Markus Lehtovirta created a new life on the beach in crafting his chairs.
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  immy Buffett tunes drift out of the open door of Markus Lehtovirta's workshop to the porch, where a dozen Adirondack chairs sit on display. The outline of a parrot is burned into the back of each chair.

The parrot's name is Captain, and his likeness also adorns the walls back in the workshop where Lehtovirta's hammer rings as he strikes a bolt that simply won't fit. Finally, he gives up and takes the piece back to the workbench, smiling. "One good thing about woodworking," he says, as he carefully re-drills the hole, "is that if you make a mistake, it's very fixable."

Lehtovirta immigrated from Finland in 1992, and worked as a software salesman during the dot-com boom. He chased what he thought was the American dream: money. He crisscrossed the country on sales calls and worked his way up to manager, but then one day, he decided he couldn't live that way anymore. He quit his job and chased his own dream in a workshop at his St. Pete Beach, Fla., home.

"All people go through this every day in this world," Lehtovirta says. "People think, 'Is there something else for me?'"

But trying to answer that question had its risk.

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