SEQUIM — For Donna Cox, scampering up to and around the steep pitches of a two- or three-story house is no big deal.
A few years ago, she roofed the home she and her husband, Jim Cox, built east of Port Angeles. More recently, she roofed an Estes Builders custom home just outside Sequim, and then went on to an older place where she fixed a leaky spot. This was one of those repairs of work done by someone who has since left the area.
Cox, who grew up in Port Angeles and Sequim, has been roofing houses here for nearly 15 years now. She learned from her father, Dave Barnes, back in the late 1990s, and has since brought other women to work on the rooftops of Clallam County.
“Roofing is easy,” Cox says in her no-nonsense tone, “if you’re not afraid of heights, and of being on the edge.”
Women can excel in this trade, she adds, because they tend to be good at looking ahead and considering the whole picture of what needs to be done.
As for the heavy lifting, Cox believes that’s right up a woman’s alley, too.
“Imagine picking up a child, onto your hip,” she says. That’s how you pick up stacks of roofing tile: with your leg muscles.
Cox’s first jobs, when she was around 30, were in what was then a brand-new development called SunLand North, off Sequim-Dungeness Way.
Before coming to work with her dad, she had done lots of office work, including a stint at the now-closed Birdwell Ford dealership in Port Angeles. There, she had an office manager who was difficult to work for — but who taught her to be detail-oriented.
New trade
That skill served her well when she took on her new trade. Wanting a job with more freedom — to be outdoors as well as outside the 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday strictures — she joined the family business.
She used to think there would come a time when her father would retire.
Not anymore. Barnes, who’s in his 60s, “is on the roof right now,” Cox said on a recent afternoon break at the Sunshine Cafe.
“You’ll never get him off the roof,” she says, only partially joking.
It hasn’t always been easy working with her dad. There has been some drama over the years, Cox says.
Barnes tended to hire men, so she had to prove herself, again and again. She worked seven days a week in those early years. She learned how to assemble the puzzle that protects a house and, she says with a smile, she learned how to “think like a drip,” as in “where would you go if you were water?”
That’s how you build a roof that won’t leak: You interlock the pieces so that drips can’t get in anywhere. This is easier said than done, of course.
Some roofs have valleys so narrow and deep, Cox says, that “you want to be Alice in Wonderland” and shrink yourself enough to fit into that tight spot.
These days Cox does a lot of work with Jerri Campbell, whom she met at SunLand North. Campbell was an insulation installer interested in branching out, so Cox invited her onto her roofing crew.
This April, the women will have been working together for seven years.
“We get along so well,” Campbell says. “We have the same kind of conscience about our work,” about doing it right.
The approach, she says, is to think of the house you’re working on as your own.
Campbell and Cox make a good team, in large part because they share the same sense of humor.
“It’s almost like we’re sisters sometimes,” Campbell says.
“We crank up the music,” Cox adds, “and laugh a lot.”
On the right roof
One day about 10 years ago, Cox happened to meet the right man on a roof. A contractor introduced her to Jim Cox, who, like her, was going through a divorce.
Not long after, Cox’s aunt talked her into going out to 7 Cedars Casino to hear some music.
“You’ve got to have some social life,” the aunt said.
Jim was at the casino that particular evening. They saw each other, they talked, “and we’ve been together ever since,” says Cox.
She and her husband are partners in The Plumbing Connection; he does the plumbing work and she keeps the books.
“Plumbing and roofing go hand in hand,” Cox quips.
Fishing is one pastime the couple enjoys together; Cox also loves to take her quarter horses out for trail rides. Jim goes with her only occasionally.
Missing her mother
So these days, Cox is missing the company of her mother and fellow horsewoman Jeanne Schroedel. Schroedel up and moved to Montana in November, to work at a ranch run by friends she made in Sequim.
Cox is happy for her mom.
“She married my dad when she was a teenager,” she says.
And though her parents divorced long ago, “she has never ventured from here.”
So when the opportunity to work as a cook and riding instructor arose, Cox urged Schroedel to go for it.
“‘Mom, you only live once,’ I told her.”
As for Cox, she’s also open to change. Her children, Lorene and Sean McCreary, are grown up; she welcomed her first grandchild, Sean’s son Ryder, in November.
Cox is 45 and thinking ahead; she knows she can’t keep doing the physical work of roofing forever. She thinks about scaling back to only keeping the books for her father’s business.
Switching to full-time office work could be a good thing in some respects, though Cox also knows it would be a major adjustment to come indoors and sit at a desk all day.
For young women considering careers in construction, however, Cox is upbeat.
“If you’re a hard worker, you can make exactly what the guys do,” she says. “And you can make more by working faster.”
