Don Lord has always been one to go his own way, unaffected by popular opinion.

If he’d listened to others, he would never have opened his new eatery, Dragonfly Coffee Plus, in a decrepit, 1860 building which he’s restoring on the corners of West and Water streets in Machias.

“I must have had a hundred people stop to tell me that I was wasting my time to fix this old building,” said Lord, 35. “If you say it can’t be done, then somebody should do it. If we’d listened to all the doubters, we wouldn’t have walked on the moon.”

One time Lord did listen to the naysayers around him, and he still regrets it. Lord always wrestled with conventional education, and his teachers told him he wasn’t college material. So he worked with his hands as a mechanic, eventually opening his own garage, across the street from the building that would become his coffee shop.

Then, at age 29, poetry began to pour out of Lord on a daily basis. Before long, he had written 75 poems, which he showed to one of his regular customers, who taught English at the University of Maine at Machias and insisted that Lord return to school. (The poems were published in a book, “Twisted Tides.”)

He did well in a poetry course, then took a creative writing course. But during an advanced grammar class, Lord ran into a problem.

“I can write a paper in proper English, and I know when a sentence is wrong,” he explained. “But when I had to dissect a sentence, I didn’t get it.”

Lord was then tested by Joanne Pritchard, who discovered that Lord was dyslexic and had attention deficit disorder.

After that diagnosis, Lord worked with the state Department of Labor’s vocational rehabilitation program to obtain money to attend Landmark College in Putney, Vt., which specialized in students with “learning differences,” for two semesters in 1998.

“Landmark taught me a lot about writing papers, time management and how to recognize my own dyslexia and ADD and work with it,” Lord recalled.

Lord is back attending UMM, and hopes to become a teacher someday. Traditional book learning will always be difficult for him.

“I need [the instructor] to make me understand,” he said. “Once I get it, I can fly with it. But I’m not going to get it on my own.”

An example of the problems Lord faces came in an art class he took at UMM.

“I found out I’m artistically declined,” he said with a smile. “I drew a dragon, and the art teacher said that it was a nice sock puppet. If I draw what I see backward, it comes out right. I can’t draw things out of my head; instead I have to copy them.”

Despite that, another of Lord’s hobbies is black-and-white photography. His works decorate the walls of the coffee shop.

“It’s visual,” he explained. “Fifty percent of taking a good picture is experimenting. Every rule they give me, I break.”

Opening the coffee shop on April 1 fulfills Lord’s lifelong dream.

“Machias needed a place to go and hang out, to have coffee and eat some sweet foods,” he said. “There’s nowhere you can go to relax, in a homelike atmosphere.”

Lord bought the building from the state. When he bought it, the basement was flooded and there was still a turkey in the oven.

“It was not habitable when I took it over,” he recalled. “It wasn’t worth saving, but it’s such a neat house. It has character.”

Lord has been renovating the building, largely on his own, since May 1998. This included the new addition which houses the cafe’s kitchen area, and an upstairs apartment, which he rents out. He recycled as much of the original materials as possible.

Right now, Lord is offering a simple menu of sandwiches, soup, baked goods (including dragonfly-shaped sugar cookies), coffees and teas and sodas, smoothies and iced coffees. He hopes to add ice cream this summer.

He wants to have live entertainment every other weekend. An open-mike night in April drew 50 people. He’s hoping to resume performances this month.

He pretty runs the comfortable cafe himself, including doing the baking. He starts at 6 a.m., leaving from 8 a.m. to midnight, depending on what work he needs to do in the garage. Sometimes, friends or relatives come to relieve him.

Lord has a slowly growing customer base, and he’s hopeful that the cafe will succeed. But he’s not afraid to fail.

“If you don’t try something, how do you know if you can make it?,” he pondered. “Failure is the best teaching device you can have. The only reason that I can fix something is that I’ve taken it apart before, and couldn’t get it back together again.”

The Dragonfly Coffee Plus is open 7 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday and 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday.