When the new gets old

I am currently working at remodeling the house I did much of my growing up in back in the 1950s.

We built the house in the summer of 1953. I was 13 years old. This was at a time when I was getting old enough to do some regular work, with direction from a pro, as we say. I became a block-layer’s assistant, a carpenter’s helper, a materials mover, a nail driver, and various and sundry task doer. I like to think that I helped build the house. At least I can point to quite a number of things that I carried, or nailed down, or stuffed in as the construction was going on.

The experience of working on a house that I helped build nearly 70 years ago has been striking; sometimes jolting. Things that I helped put together as brand spanking new have become old. Some things have deteriorated from age, or suffered decay from unseen water seepages, and much that was in style in 1953 is now considered oldfashioned by my family. For example, when we built the house, we installed a picture window as the south window of the living room. Picture windows were all the rage at the time, especially in the ranch-style houses, which were also all the rage at the time. Ours was not a ranch-style house.

The ranch-style houses were long and low, often built on concrete pads, sometimes with a built-in garage at one end of the house. Our new house, on the other hand, was built over a partial basement, and the part that was not over the basement was built with a crawl space under the floor. Actually our fine picture window was one of the first things to go as the house aged and changes needed to be made. The woodwork around the picture window presented difficulties with sealing out the rains, and the window frame deteriorated early on. Eventually my folks changed out the picture window for a more conventional multi-pane window. Now I find that even that replacement window is in poor shape, and it looks like I will be in the replacing windows business right soon.

We were a farm family, not really poor, but not with a lot of money to spend. We were building out of the pressure of need, because our old house (which may have been 100 years old) was presenting many problems and not serving the family very well. We were trying to do much of the work on the house ourselves, as was common for farm families in those days. Farm people tended to be what I later came to call Jacks-of-all-trades, though maybe master of none. Farm people didn’t have money to hire their stuff done, so I’ll-doit-myself was the common resort for getting things done. We did hire some of the jobs out to pros though. When we were pouring the basement floor, we hired

Merle Love to do the concrete work. We had done concrete work ourselves when we were building chicken houses and garages and so on, but Dad wanted this to be a better-looking job. Also, the press of farmwork kept Dad from spending large chunks of time on the house. We also hired Mr. Orville Wollcott from Mountain, Mo., to lay the blocks for our basement walls. At the time, I was eager to show that I could do stuff, so I became the mortar mixer and block carrier. Mr. Wollcott was a very fast block-layer, and I was busy, busy trying to keep up and keep him busy.

We did have one calamity during the laying of the basement walls. We had finished laying the blocks, but had not yet completed filling in outside them with dirt, when our drought broke and we got a big rain. The water collected outside the basement wall on the west side, and the pressure pushed the whole wall over onto the basement

floor. When I came out to work that morning, I was getting ready to continue my mason’s helper role, but when I walked up to the edge of the basement I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The basement had about two feet of standing water, and nearly all of the 30-foot west wall had smashed to the basement floor. We spent several weeks cleaning up the mud and fragments of broken blocks, and cleaning the blocks that were still intact and could be reused. Even today some of the west wall blocks still show signs of the red stain from that red clay mud. I can say that I carried some of these blocks twice as we built the house.

When we finally arrived at the stage for assembling the house on top of the basement, my Dad hired Cecil Lawson to work with us and to show us how to do things. We boys, as well as my Dad, kind of became carpenter’s helpers. I was a lumber carrier, a hand sawer and a nail driver. I remember that Cecil had us assemble the wall studs on the floor, then raise them and nail them in place in sections. I would not have thought to do it that way, but it worked very well for the most part. Actually I am in the midst of remedying one section in the living room where the sections were not fastened together soundly, and a crack developed over time.

My brothers and I did learn quite a lot in the experience of helping build the farmhouse. Now we are all 75 to 80 years old, and the house is not new any more. I don’t seem to be able to take away any of my 80 years, but maybe I can make some of the house like new again.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, and a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621. The opinions expressed are those of the author.