Additions Blend into Bullock House

When you look at the house at 505 Hardee St. in Dallas, you’d never notice the changes the owners have made.

That was what Charlie and Phyllis Watts had hoped for. When the couple added a family room to the back of the Victorian-era house in 1997, they matched the siding so that, even if it didn’t have the shutter-like look as the rest of the house, it blended right in. And they were even able to find the exact same metal shingles that cover the roof.

The house was built in 1900 by James Homer and Mattie Missouri Spinks Bullock. Bullock, who was a bookkeeper at the cotton mill in Dallas, had the lumber for the house brought in by rail from the Braswell Mountain area. After Mattie Bullock died in 1923, James Bullock lived in the house with his children for 48 years until he died in 1971.

Three years later, the Watts family purchased the house. While the structure of the house has remained the same, there have been some changes and additions made in the last 37 years. The house still has its original floors, molding and ceilings, but sheetrock was put over the plaster walls to prevent them from re-cracking. A bathroom that once was at the end of the downstairs hallway near the back of the house was taken out, and a powder room was installed where the original bathtub used to be. The family closed in the back porch and added on a family room. They also built a deck outside of the large room.

Two bedrooms on the right side of the house had been rented out when Bullock lived in the home, and those are now an office and the master bedroom. A master bathroom was added in 1997.

“People have come through and said, ‘My parents lived in this side of the house’, so I know that’s true,” Phyllis Watts said.

The second floor of the house was never finished, Watts said. When she and her husband purchased the house, the upstairs consisted of a hallway and wainscoting. There were no walls above the wainscoting.

“They had it ready to make a wall, but it wasn’t done,” Watts said. “It blew my mind because there were four kids (in the Bullock family).”

In addition to finishing the walls, the Watts family added two bedrooms, which became their daughters’ bedrooms.

Behind the home on the Watts’ 2 acres of land are remnants of the turn of the 20th century. The outhouse that the Bullocks used still stands, as does the first family’s garage and smokehouse, which were built in 1918 and 1913, respectively. The smokehouse still stands on piles of rocks, called pillows, which Watts said is how the main house originally was built. It has since been underpinned with bricks.

“It’s been a good place, a good home,” she said.