Building a house these days is a lot more complicated that it was a century ago.  Today a home builder takes on the job and subcontracts with a number of specialists, such as electricians, plumbers, masons, and painters.  First of all one has to have a survey done and get a permit before starting the job.  My wife and I had a custom home built about six years ago, and we were surprised to discover how many separate decisions and processes were required.  The fact that we modified an existing floor plan rather than having a new one created by an architect saved a good bit of time.

Back in the 1950s I worked one summer as a carpenter’s helper.  My uncle was a master carpenter and he was building a new brick home for a family that lived in my home community.  First we had to tear down an old house at that location and reclaim some of the good lumber, which involved removing nails.  I found the work tedious and was happy when my summer job ended.

I hadn’t thought about the experience until I recently interviewed a 99-year old gentleman who has vivid memories of observing a house being built for his family in the early 1920s.

Among the earliest memories of B.O. Merriman (born 1914) is the house built on his father’s place by Abe Cain and John Clark. The location was a farm in Dallas County, near White Rock Lake.

These two carpenters from Richardson camped out in a shed on the building site Monday-Friday over a period of several months. 
They took a three-room house and enlarged it to seven rooms and also built a barn for K.O. and Cary Merriman, the parents of Bo (as he is known).  These skilled carpenters worked with a very basic set of tools: hammer, saw, T-square and level.  They even removed old nails (old-style square ones) from the used boards and straightened them for reuse (along with the good boards).

Not having a car, these men were delivered to work on Monday each week and on Friday afternoon someone would pick them up and drive them to Richardson for the weekend.  They would tell Mr. Merriman what lumber they needed for the next few days and he would bring it in by mule-drawn wagon directly from a sawmill.  He’d pay them each Friday for the week’s work.  Bo’s mother provided them two meals a day.  Bo really looked up to the men and tried to help or stay out of the way as needed.

The Merriman farm was outside the city limits of Dallas and no building permit was required.  The two carpenters did all the work themselves.  The house didn’t have electricity and no plumbing was needed, since the water supply came from a well and entered the house in a bucket.  The bathroom was an outhouse.

Sometimes it is good for us to be reminded of how much everyday life has changed in the last hundred years, and I have enjoyed talking with Bo Merriman about his memories.