Me on a job site in my early 20s.
When my daughter was in kindergarten, she came home and said, “My teacher wants to know what we want to be when we grow up.” So I asked my daughter—who was prissy and loved to wear dresses—what she wanted to be, and she said, “Well, I guess I have to be a floor sander.” I asked my son, who was in first grade, if he wanted to be a floor sander, and he said, “No, that’s a girl job!” He saw me going out to sand floors every day and thought it was a girl job, and my daughter thought that’s all she could ever be!
This all started when I was 9 years old and began installing wood flooring. My father brought me to work with him, and I enjoyed that more than cleaning the house and cooking and the girly stuff that moms were supposed to teach their daughters. By 13, my dad taught me to sand floors, and I worked for him every single weekend. I used to make $30 a weekend; I was the highest paid kid in seventh grade!
When I turned 18 I went to school for fashion design; it took me four years to graduate. In 1982, when I got married, I had been working for a year and a half as an assistant fashion designer, and I realized starting out in the fashion industry was way too difficult. I was making $150 a week in fashion but making $150 a day doing wood floors, so I began running crews for my dad full time.
Back then, there were no women on a job site. My father told me, “You are going to have to work twice as hard as any one of these guys, because you will only be considered half as good.” And I did. My guys knew what I expected, and I would never hand over a job if it wasn’t good enough for my own house.
Because it was unheard of to have a woman on a job site, we ran into many funny situations. I had a hard time convincing many people that I was, in fact, a woman. I tried everything in God’s creation to let them know I was a woman. I let my hair grow long, I put makeup on, I wore jewelry … and every time we went to a new job my father would get an old man coming up to him and saying, “We don’t like guys like that on a job.” My dad would say, “What kind of guy are you talking about?” and they would point to me. My dad would have to explain to them that I was his daughter!
Another time I remember there was a crew looking at me, and I could tell they were talking about me. I heard one say to the other, “I can’t ask her that.” I said, “Oh my God, just ask me already. “He said, ‘My guy thinks you must be gay,’” and I asked him why he thought that. He said, “You’re a woman doing a man’s job.” I told him, “I have the best job in the world because three-quarters of the year I get to see half-dressed men!”
An old guy walked up to me and started rubbing his chin; he said, “It’s OK, big fella, I never started shaving till I was 26!”
I can remember so many situations like that. On Fridays all our crews would meet up at a diner and my dad would buy us lunch. An old guy walked up to me and started rubbing his chin; he said, “It’s OK, big fella, I never started shaving till I was 26!” Another time when I was wearing a big winter coat, I asked the builder where the heat was in the house, and he patted my belly and told me it looked like I had enough to keep me warm. I opened up my coat to show him I was a pregnant woman.
One of the funniest jobs was one where my dad helped me drop off tools before he left for another job. I was probably 23 and already had a crew of guys working for me, but I was going to start the job alone. My dad came out of the house, stuck a pad of paper and pencil in my hand and said, “Follow my lead.” We went into the house and there was this little old man who followed us everywhere. My dad told me, “See, here’s the electrical box, draw a picture … this gets hooked into this side, this gets hooked here, see how they alternate? OK, now I’ll show you how to put the paper on the drum…” we went around the whole house like that as I pretended to take notes as if I had never seen one of these tools before in my life. Finally he said, “I’m going to send you to this house tomorrow and I want you to do this house for me.” This old man was following us around all worried, not believing that my father was going to do this. The next day I got to the job, and the old man again followed me around. I hooked up the big machine and started sanding. A half hour later the old man said, “What did you do that to me for? You had me worried.” I said, “Yeah, that was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?”
Being a woman in the business wasn’t just funny; it was useful. With my background in fashion, I was good at working with colors, especially the whites and pastels that were big at that time. In fact, another company used to pay my dad to have me mix the stain colors for his crews.
Mainly, I just had to earn people’s respect and show them I knew what I was doing, and once I did that I didn’t have a problem. It was the same way when I started working for a finish manufacturer 14 years ago. Since then I’ve become involved in the NWFA schools and learned so much, and I became the first woman to be NWFACP certified in Installation and Sanding & Finishing. You just have to be yourself and know what you’re doing—and that is true whether you’re a man or a woman.
