Online Exclusives Published: 04/01/2008
Building by numbers
Buyers Rediscover Appeal of Kit Homes
Beyond the nostalgia of understanding how your parents and grandparents grew up, a new generation of home owners are drawn to the turn-of-the-century catalog homes.
Pick your dream house from a catalog and have it shipped to you piece-by-piece. That was the idea behind these once popular ready-to-assemble homes sold through mail order by the department store Sears in the early 1900s. And home owners today are rediscovering the charm of Sears kit homes.Sears got into the building business in 1895, when it sold precut lumber to far-flung farmers. It started selling more than 40 house patterns in 1908.
By the 1920s, plans and supplies for any one of 90 Sears Modern Home designs could be ordered from the department store's thick catalog, giving Americans everywhere from rural towns to big cities an unprecedented opportunity to build a professionally designed home. All purchases, along with a 75-page instruction booklet, arrived on a freight-train boxcar, with each piece of lumber marked to make construction quick and easy.
"A large percentage was built by the home owner; it was very much a do-it-yourself project," says Chapa. "Today, they might subcontract it out."
For more than 40 years, Sears sold about 370 house plans for just $1 (making their profits on the supplies). The company sold about 70,000 houses during that time, according to historian Rose Thornton, author of Finding the Houses That Sears Built (Gentle Beam Publications, 2004). Exact figures are difficult to obtain because the department store later discarded its sales records, Thornton says.
The History and Appeal
For all of its trappings of romance and nostalgia, the Sears kit house embodies the American Dream of owning a home unlike any other residence on the block or even in town. Who wouldn't want to own a Sears kit house, which had a reputation of being well-built and well-designed?
To be one of the first in your community to build a Skywater, Bonita, or Vallonia model in the 1920s and '30s would be akin to assembling a Martha Stewart-brand home now. The completed construction would make your home the talk of the neighborhood and demonstrate that you owned the latest and greatest in design and technology.
Unlike Martha Stewart houses, which are sold in certain regions by KB Home, Sears "sold everything from bungalows and neo-Tudors to mini-mansions," says Jim Chapa, who is writing a field guide to Sears houses with co-author Rebecca Hunter.
The nation's extensive railroad system brought Sears' mail-order plans and materials to almost every state but Hawaii and Alaska. However, the homes tended to be clustered in the Midwest and Northeast, where it was least expensive to ship from a Sears mill.
"Those who bought Sears kit houses were not wealthy; they were working-class people," says Hunter, who wrote Putting Sears Homes on the Map (R L Hunter, 2004). The largest known collection of Sears kit homes — 152 — is in Carlinville, Ill. Local employer Standard Oil Co. had the dwellings built for its workers.
Sears also sold mortgages, which turned out to be a bad move during the Great Depression when home owners by the thousands defaulted on their loans. While Sears got out of the lending business, it never really recovered its losses and eventually stopped selling architectural house plans in 1940.
Marketing Kit Homes to Buyers
More than six decades later, interest in Sears kit homes continues to grow as home owners rediscover the solid homes in which their parents and grandparents grew up.
Who might like a Sears house? Historic-preservation buffs and anyone who appreciates a well-designed building made with quality materials.
"They think it's the coolest thing," says Hunter, who regularly takes calls from real estate professionals about homes they believe to be built from Sears plans. "People are very conscious of how well-designed and built these are."
If you are able to document that the residence is indeed a bonafide Sears kit home, let potential buyers know about it, Chapa says. He suggests putting the catalog that features the home model on the dining room table during showings, and then show prospective buyers more proof: the numbers of exposed timbers in the basement. Even if the buyers never heard of a kit home before, they're sure to be impressed.
How to Identify a Sears Kit Home
While it's a difficult task to identify a true Sears kit home, it's not impossible. Here's what to look for:
- - Start on the outside. See if the home's style matches a house in one of the early Sears catalogues or Thornton's book. Reproduction catalogues also can be found online. Measure the exterior, document the window layout and the roofline, and see if all those measurements correspond to what's in the catalogue. Take into account that the original plan may have been altered, and there may have been subsequent additions.
- - Check the rafters in the basement, crawl space, or attic. If these timbers come from a Sears kit, they will have a distinctive stamp. Cary, Ill., practitioner John Trandel recently sold an A-frame house that he suspected was a Sears model, judging from the floor plan and the position of the kitchen. Yet the house had an uncharacteristic stone facade. Trandel found a beam inside with the Sears stamp. He mentioned the find to the seller, who was surprised. He later learned the home was built in 1925; the stone facing was added in 1930. It's important to note that not all Sears homes were built with wood supplied by the company.
- - Seek out shipping labels. These can be found on the back of millwork and moldings, Thornton says. A Sears label will have the address 925 Homan Ave., Chicago — the company's headquarters in the early 20th century.
- - Search for home mortgages and building permits. These sometimes can be found in local government records with the architect "Sears Roebuck" written on it.
If you can spot any of these telltale signs of a Sears kit home, you can intrigue buyers and delight your clients as you help them appreciate living in a part of American architectural history.
Mary Beth Klatt is a freelance writer with a passion for architecture and home design.
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