SAND CREEK — Back when Jeanie DeCocker first went into business for herself, she would get phone calls from potential customers asking to speak to her husband. 

Her reply? “He works for the phone company. I’m the one you want.”

After all, 30 years ago it was pretty much unheard of for a woman to be the owner of a masonry business. But today, DeCocker’s On the Level Masonry Restoration, based in Sand Creek, even has two women working with her as stonemasons: Dawn Moran and Cagni Karl.

Moran came to the business 10 years ago after having previously been a dental assistant until the dentist she worked for retired. Karl is in her first year with On the Level.

DeCocker’s sons, Tobias and Seth Goetz, have also worked with their mother several times over the years.

DeCocker worked in several jobs including retail over the years after high school. Then her niece came home from the Marines, where she had been a heavy equipment operator, saw that her aunt was ready for a change, and got her interested in trying a new career. The end result was that DeCocker became an apprentice bricklayer.

“I didn’t know anything about it at first,” she said. But after she did the tuckpointing at a job site and washed the brick, “it looked great and it gave me a lot of satisfaction, making the old look old but be new.”

She began doing masonry work on the side for friends and family and eventually left the company she was working for and started her own business.

On the Level does both residential and commercial restoration work, including repairing or restoring chimneys, walkways, foundations, walls, exteriors, and retaining walls at lake homes. Historical restoration is one of the company’s specialties.

DeCocker and her employees do jobs all over Lenawee County and have also handled projects in Brooklyn and into Washtenaw County. Their work has included a number of buildings in downtown Tecumseh and Adrian, such as the Masonic Temple building in Tecumseh and the Lenawee County Historical Society museum in Adrian.

The oldest home DeCocker has worked on dated back to 1853.

Making new masonry match the existing brick or stone work is a real art, involving matching bricks and mortar colors to what’s already there. It might take finding a supplier that has some old bricks that will match the ones at the site, or it could involve using certain techniques to replicate the texture of the existing masonry. And as for the mortar, “Dawn’s a whiz at matching colors,” DeCocker said.

Her personal favorite part of being a stonemason is the same thing that made her love the work back when she first started out as a bricklayer: tuckpointing. 

“I love the results afterward. It’s like a new product,” she said.

She really enjoys working with brick and stone both. “It all gives you the same sense of satisfaction when you’re done with it,” she said.

What’s the secret to being a good stonemason?

“It’s very meticulous work, so it takes being detail-oriented,” she said.

And it also means being personally invested in the work. “I always tell the people who work for me, ‘if you don’t want it on your house, don’t put it on this one.”

That attention to detail and commitment to doing quality work has led, over the course of her 30 years in business, to a substantial customer base. “We have a lot of satisfied customers,” she said, “because I don’t leave unless they are.”

On the Level Masonry Restoration can be reached at 517-442-5969.