Joy Rich started working construction jobs with her father from a young age. Enjoying the fact that she was able to get dirty and there would be a different job every day was always much more appealing than doing the same thing every day. Being both younger, 19, and a woman in a traditionally male-dominated profession has created its own obstacles, but Rich has found her way of dominating in her own world.

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I start off with a Taylor ham and egg sandwich on an everything bagel from a local bagel place. Drive to the job, get set up. Knee pads, tool belt and find out exactly what the job is that day.

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Usually, it isn’t a very big job – fixing walls, electrical work, replacing windows – just something me and my dad can handle together. Sometimes it can get a bit bigger and we need to bring in other people. You can’t exactly build a house with two people. Well, I guess you can, but it would take a long time and probably wouldn’t come out very well.

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My dad and I built the house we’re living in now – me, my parents, two sisters, and a brother – but it took a few other people to build it good enough for all of us to live in comfortably for years. We built most of it together, but it helped a lot to have other people come in and take stuff out and do the little things nobody wants to do – sweeping, stripping copper, tedious shit.

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Even if they’re helpful, they can definitely be a hassle at times. Working with my dad can be the same, he’s a very tough person and can be very stubborn and short-tempered, but at least he never questions whether or not I can accomplish something and will let me do jobs without worrying. With other people who don’t know me as well, I don’t usually get seen as well.

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Most people usually question whether or not I could do something, or just put me on smaller jobs. I don’t know if it’s because I’m usually about 10 years younger than them, or because I’m a woman. I just like to tell myself it’s because I’m younger, but I know it’s probably that I’m a woman. Either way, it’s satisfying to surpass their expectations by a landslide every time I work with them.

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You don’t know true happiness until you get to see an old white guy suck up his pride and ask a younger woman to do his job on a construction site.

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Getting down and dirty has been something I have loved since I was little. I’ve never been clean and pristine. My parents could never get me in a dress for more than five minutes before I would get it messed up and dirty.

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Doing the construction stuff with my dad allowed me to be able to get dirty, but also be able to do it in a constructive way. My mom never had much of a say in my dad would or wouldn’t let me do, but she did have one rule. I wasn’t allowed to do roof work until I was at least 10. I can’t say we followed that rule, I can’t say we didn’t. All I can say is that I broke my arm when I was 9 and gravity is a bitch.

 

Looking back, I’ve just realized that I’ve been doing this for around a decade. That broken arm was probably my biggest injury, so far at least, but I’ve come close a couple of times. You’d think almost hitting myself with a hammer would be common, but I come closer to getting a nail to some body part than hitting myself with a hammer.

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We keep a first-aid kit in my dad’s truck and it has all the necessities in it. A few band-aids, Neosporin, some super glue for bigger cuts, an ice pack. Normal stuff. We’ve never had to use it much, luckily. Maybe a band-aid here and there, but other than my broken arm and my dad breaking his thumb putting in a window a few years ago, we’ve never had a lot of big injuries on site.

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Whenever something does go wrong, we usually know how to take care of it pretty quickly. Or at least quickly enough for it not to cause any serious damage to anything. Just last month we were working on a house and we thought the water was shut off. Little did the family know they were going to be getting a surprise indoor swimming pool in their basement. We removed a pipe and water started to flood out of it. Apparently, nobody had told the city that they had to turn off the water to the entire property. It set us back a couple of days, but it’s pretty funny to look back on.

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It’s a pretty tough job sometimes. It’s definitely not the easiest thing I could choose to spend my time doing, but it definitely has its positives. Like, especially when it’s colder out and we have to sit around the few little heaters we have, the people who have been in the business for a long time tell stories and it’s cool to hear about the past experiences they’ve had.

Some things that the older people have gone through make a surprise pool seem like nothing. A mixture of walls falling over, roofs caving in, animals getting stuck in places they really shouldn’t be. Experiences that they laugh at now, but they definitely weren’t laughing about then.

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My cousin who helps us sometimes has worked in the field for around five years longer than I have and he always tells me, ‘as long as you got a story from it, it wasn’t all bad.’ I try to stick to that thought every time something bad happens. I never purposefully go out of my way to make bad things happen, but when they do I always laugh now because I look forward to telling everyone about it.

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I’m sure my dad would love for me to take over after him, keep the business in the family and all, but I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. I love it and all, I’ve been doing it for a long time and I’ve been around it for all of my life, but I don’t think I’m going to be 50 and still hammering away on the rooftops.

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I think I’m going to do it until I’m 30 at the latest, then probably go back to school. I’ve been going for construction stuff – planning, math, building stuff – but I think I’m going to go for space or something like that. It would be cool to go into something like that. I don’t know what exactly, but I’ve always like space and science.

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In the end, I guess I just want to be able to do it long enough to get a secure amount of money saved – if I start getting paid for more jobs, that is – and change into doing my own things. Someday I want to earn my pilot's license and go somewhere to build a log cabin away from everything to take vacations to, but that’s still a while away.