The East Otago man is the owner of Puketapu Timber and operates a portable sawmill which is mostly based near Palmerston.
Originally from Wanganui, he has spent his career in the forestry, logging and timber industries. He came to the South Island in 1976, after the big winds in Canterbury, and remained in the South.
''I love it, I absolutely love it ... I've got sawdust in my blood and that's it,'' he said.
Now Mr Cox is combining those skills and his feature timber with an ambitious restoration project, the scale of which could easily grace the likes of popular television series Grand Designs.
The distinctive historic stone building on the Palmerston-Dunback Rd, which he is restoring, was listed as category B in the Waitaki District Council's district plan as a ''ruin''.
It was a utility building, part of the Alexandra Hotel complex, and it included a large barn, which was sometimes used as a dance-floor, dairy, loose-boxes, stables and a cart shed.
As well as the Alexandra Hotel, the area, known as Glenpark, used to also boast a school and flour mill.
Margaret Mewhinney was the last licence holder at the Alexandra Hotel, a building which was also derelict when it burnt down in 1977. He believed the hotel was first licensed in the 1860s.
Keen on history, Mr Cox was saddened to see the derelict utility building ''rotting and falling to the ground''.
He bought the property a few years ago and knew exactly what he was aiming for, as he could envisage the end result.
While it was the fourth old property that he had ''done up'', it was a very different proposition to old wooden villas, he said.
''It's a real proper project; it's not a play one. It's been a really bloody interesting sort of learning curve, one challenge after another.
''There is a sector out there that think I'm completely nuts and others think I'm a hero,'' he mused.
It was ''extraordinary'' the different attitudes towards the project - ''some are very envious, others reckon I'll die before I get there'' - and many people who stopped off had been looking at it for ''years and years'' and were pleased he was doing something about it.
With its limestone quoining, the building was ''quite unique'' and there were others in the area that were built in the same distinctive style.
He believed it would have been a ''pretty specialised bunch of stonemasons'' that worked on the building, saying the work was very precise. The walls had not moved and the foundations were ''beautifully made. They were built to last,'' he said.
He reckoned the restoration project would be completed in about two years. In the meantime, he was also busy with his business, saying he had more work than he could ever handle.
There were diminishing numbers of portable sawmills around - ''it's a dying breed, sadly'' - and the industry, including logging, was finding it difficult to find young men to work in it, which was ''tragic''.
''I don't think young guys want to get into it because it's too hard. They can make more sitting looking at a screen,'' he said.
Mr Cox was mostly providing feature timber, such as macrocarpa, larch and oregon, although he milled ''all sorts'' for farmers.
A lot of his timber had gone into sustainable housing, the likes of post-and-beam, and straw-bale builds.
